


Omens Unsolved

by acehandles



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series), Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Background Newt/Anathema, F/M, M/M, Post-Canon, Rated T for swearing, but he’s in here, couldn’t find a character tag for Eric The Disposable Demon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-05-19 14:04:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 24,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19358497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acehandles/pseuds/acehandles
Summary: Post Armageddidn’t, Crowley and Aziraphale start a youtube channel where they investigate haunted spots and historical mysteries, and more often than not turn out to have been involved.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Basically I watched Good Omens and then saw that ‘hey there demons its me ya boy’ but with Crowley instead of the Buzzfeed guy post, and then I created this, my magnum opus. I have knowledge of the basic concept of Buzzfeed Unsolved and have watched GO through twice now. Working on reading the books also. Anyways enjoy the This.

It was, somehow, Newt who first found out about the videos. He greatly enjoyed watching youtube videos, when he could somehow convince someone to click on them for him, and in the time he’d spent in Tadfield since the Apocalypse failed to occur, he’d been quite successful in getting the Them to click on a new video for him once every few hours.

On this particular occasion, he’d been scrolling - a safe act so long as he didn’t accidentally Tap any of the videos (which he had done last Tuesday and as a result now had a new phone) - down his recommended videos list, when he saw a video from a channel he didn’t recognise.

‘The Most Haunted Pub In Britain!’, the title boasted, and so Newt, newly interested in the occult and ghosts and the like, requested Adam tap that video for him next.

Imagine his surprise when Aziraphale and Crowley, the strange Angel/Demon duo he’d had brief acquaintance with during the Not So End Times, appeared on screen after a short titles sequence.

“Hello and welcome back to Unsolved: Supernatural,” the angel greeted cheerfully from inside a fairly typical British pub. He and Crowley were sat at stools by the bar, and were - if not the only people in the bar, then at least - the only people in frame.

“They know what the show’s called, angel,” the demon Crowley muttered, shooting his cohost a look that was unreadable through his dark sunglasses.

“I suppose,” Aziraphale agreed reluctantly. “In any case: today we are in the White Horse, said to be the most haunted pub in Britain!”

Aziraphale looked quite excited at the prospect. Crowley, not so much. He gave a glance round the pub, most of which was still off camera, and muttered, voice quiet enough to not be picked up by the microphone, “I swear I recognise this place...”

Crowley’s pondering either went unnoticed or was ignored by Aziraphale, for the angel continued his introduction and explanation of the rumoured haunting while Crowley remained lost in thought.

“... It is said that, some time in the 1800s, ghosts appeared before all of the patrons at the bar, rattling the tankards and even lifting one poor man off his feet.”

Crowley had tuned back into Aziraphale’s speech halfway through, and as he caught the end of it his eyes widened in an expression that to the common viewer would be mistaken for shock, but Newt, knowing as he did that these two men were not men but rather ethereal and or occult beings who had been around since before the creation of the Earth, suspected (correctly) may be more along the lines of sudden remembrance.

“And even further back,” Aziraphale remained blissfully unaware of his companion’s sudden distress, “The daughter of the pub owner during the early 1600s was accused of witchcraft for turning a man into a snake!”

“W- wow,” Crowley spoke awkwardly. “Sounds, uh, miraculous,” he continued pointedly, trying to make eye contact with the angel sat beside him for good measure.

The easy smile that Aziraphale had previously been wearing morphed into a rather more forced one. “Ah. Um. Not - not miraculous, Crowley, this was the work of a ghost, surely!”

Crowley rolled his eyes. “Yes, I’m sure it was a very dead and very ghostly ghost that did that.” He was silent for a second. “Or maybe, it was just that everyone was drunk off their heads and hallucinated the whole thing,” he continued, almost convincingly.

“You’re no fun,” Aziraphale pouted. “In any case, tonight we are going to stay in the pub, and see if we can’t contact the mysterious ghost that is said to haunt the place.”

“Alright then, who are we looking for?”

“The man everyone suspects is the ghost died here in 1767 during a bar fight - choked to death when another man lifted him up by the neck, which explains the levitating man.” Aziraphale said, having produced a note card that presumably contained this information. “And his name was. Ah. John Smith.”

“Not very inventive with names in 1767, were they?” Crowley commented, leaning onto Aziraphale’s shoulder to get a look at the card. “Could be any number of John Smiths knocking about. How’d we know we’d got the right one even if we manage to... contact him from the beyond.” He said this last part in a mocking tone. One which could also, just for example, have been used to say ‘celestial harmonies’ at some point.

The angel passed the card over to his demon friend, and closed his eyes. After a few moments of... something (even Newt in his above-average-for-the-typical-man-but-far-below-average-amongst-those-In-The-Know understanding of such things wasn’t sure what he was attempting), Aziraphale opened his eyes again with a sigh.

“Well, there’s no spirits around anyway,” he announced.

Crowley pulled off what could’ve been a very skilled sleight of hand trick to make the card he had been reading disappear. “Well, there’s still one part of the experience that we could recreate.”

Thus started a montage of Crowley and Aziraphale knocking back a rather impressive amount of drinks, set to Don’t Stop Me Now (this was not the intended song, but Crowley had left the laptop he’d edited the footage together on in the Bentley for just a bit too long and had uploaded the video without noticing). And if by the tenth glass of wine the bottles started changing of their own accord to be of a better vintage, then who would notice through the clever editing?

The video returned to its normal structure after about a minute of continuous drinking, by which point both angel and demon were well and truly shitfaced.

Crowley was barely sitting on his stool, mostly by this point just in Aziraphale’s lap.

“Y’wanner ‘ear a sssssecret?” he hissed, voice significantly muffled by his refusal to remove his face from Aziraphale’s shoulder.

Aziraphale nodded vaguely.

“‘S’place in’t haunted,” Crowley revealed. “S’a miracle. Demonic. Y’know,” he continued, waving his hands around uncoordinatedly. As he did so, the wine glasses on the shelves behind the duo started to rattle.

Aziraphale craned his neck round to investigate the sudden ratting noise.

“Oh, Crowley!” he grinned, and shook his cohost in an unnecessary bid to gain his attention. “It IS haunted!”

Crowley stared at the glasses, still clinking away merrily, unaffected by the attention that they were now being paid. “Maybe’s an earthquake,” he said unconvincingly. He waved his hand in another sloppy gesture, and the glasses started to float ever so slightly. “Fuck,” the demon said without heat, looking at his hand in confusion. He made another gesture, slightly more controlled, and the levitation stopped, but the shaking stayed.

“John Smith!” Aziraphale called out, looking round the empty room, “are you out there? Are you haunting us?”

Crowley made one final gesture, and the glasses stopped.

“Aww...” Aziraphale frowned, visibly disappointed. “Bye John.”

“S’not John,” Crowley muttered. At length, he extracted himself from his place smushed into the angel’s side. “‘nyways, uh, see ya next time I guess,”

Then the video came to an abrupt end, cutting to an end screen with two recommended videos on it. Both seemed to be from the same series, with similar thumbnails to the video Newt had just watched.

For a minute, Newt sat in stunned silence. Then he lifted his head, and shouted out into the quiet cottage: “Anathema!”

Said witch popped her head round the door a few moments later. “Yes, Newt?”

“You won’t what I just found on youtube!” he answered, turning his phone so it was in her view and, forgetting himself in his excitement, pressing the restart button on the video. Immediately, the phone gave out some impressive sparks, and shut off. “Ah, bugger.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, thanks for all the kudos and comments! Didn’t expect to get this much attention on the fic at all.  
> This one is a kind of continuation of the last chapter; its a QnA.  
> Enjoy!

“To be fair,” Aziraphale said, the weekend after Newt - hands held firmly behind his back to avoid breaking her laptop - had directed Anathema towards the video, “We didn’t expect that any of you would watch it.”

Aziraphale and Crowley came up to Tadfield every other week or so, now, to check that Adam wasn’t changing his mind about the whole No Apocalypse Today, Thanks, thing, and also to enjoy whatever food Anathema may have produced in her exploration of British food. Plus, Newt was now technically the head of the Witchfinder’s Army, given Shadwell’s retirement, so they had to drop off his payroll (Newt had tried to explain that he was also the Sole witchfinder, and also wasn’t even really doing that anymore, but neither Aziraphale nor Crowley had listened).

“Not like Upstairs or Downstairs have worked out the internet yet,” Crowley continued. “Even if they did see it, they’re still a bit spooked from our last visits. Probably wouldn’t do anything.”

Anathema wished, not for the first time, that she hadn’t burnt Agnes’s sequel. Mostly in this case to see how a 17th century woman would describe the ridiculous youtube career of an angel and a demon. ‘The angel and the demone shalle become well knowne on the worlde wide web, and lo, it shall be fucking dumb.’ Or something.

“Who’s your cameraman?” Newt wondered. “Didn’t think you knew any other humans.”

“Cameraman?” Crowley repeated, in the tone of someone who had previously not considered such a thing necessary, “Uh, no one.”

The good thing about being an ethereal and or occult being was that, if it never occurred to you that there should be someone controlling the camera, zooming in and out and getting the best angles and such, then it would _also_  never occur to the camera itself that someone needed to physically move it to make that happen. As such, Crowley and Aziraphale had been enjoying lovely cinematography without ever having to find someone who could do that for them.

“Oh,” said Newt, who didn’t have such luxuries in his life, “Well, I could help you out. You’d have to, um, turn the camera on and off and stuff, but i can do everything else without breaking it!”

Anathema scowled at her partner. “Don’t encourage them!”

“Why not?” Newt asked.

Of the four currently sat at the table in Anathema’s cottage, enjoying tea and scones (the two differing pronunciations of which Crowley was personally very proud of, even if Downstairs didn’t understand it), Anathema was the only one gifted with any sort of common sense, inherited from Agnes Nutter herself. As a result, she was able to tell that, perhaps, ghost and demon hunting wasn’t the best career option for an angel and an actual demon. Unfortunately, the common sense genes had diluted over the generations, and so while Anathema had a general sense that this was an ill-advised venture, she could only respond to Newt’s questioning with a shrug.

“If you want to be the cameraman, that would be lovely,” Aziraphale smiled at Newt. He took another bite of his scone (Crowley had told the angel many times that eating a scone with a knife and fork was in fact more cursed than anything anyone in Hell could ever come up with, but the angel was hell - heaven - _something_ -bent on avoiding sticky fingers, so here we were), chewed, swallowed, and wiped a single particle of clotted cream from the side of his mouth before continuing: “we do a question and answer -“

“QnA,” Crowley corrected,

“- Session after each episode,” the angel continued, undeterred. “You could help with that. It could be nice to do it out here in Tadfield,” he gestured out of the window to the idyllic countryside, “a change of pace from Crowley’s flat.”

“I’ve got all the questions ready on my phone,” Crowley said, wiggling said device as he referenced it. “We can shoot the video once you’re finished with the sc-owns, if you’re not busy.”

Newt winced at the pronunciation, and Crowley grinned. He was a master at guessing exactly which way of saying scone would provide most conflict in any given room. Though, to be fair, given Anathema’s American indifference, and Aziraphale’s refusal to take a side in the debate (the angel chose the pronunciation to please the most people), he’d only had to make sure he was annoying Newt in this specific circumstance.

“Sure, I’ve got nothing going on.”

———————

It didn’t take long to polish off the rest of the scones, and so Crowley retrieved his camera from the Bentley (it may not have been in the boot when he left for Tadfield, but it sure wasn’t going to inconvenience its demonic owner), and he, Aziraphale and Newt set off down the small country road to find a nice spot to start filming. It didn’t take long, given the (un)natural beauty of the Tadfield area, so soon Crowley and Aziraphale were sat on a pretty wooden bench under the shade of a large oak tree, with Newt a few paces in front of them, fiddling unnecessarily with the camera, that Crowley had already set rolling. Personally, the demon didn’t see why they couldn’t have just sat on the grass, but his angel had started fussing about grass stains on his favourite (and also only) jacket, prompting Crowley to roll his yellow eyes (it was a shame he wore his sunglasses for these videos, the people were missing out on some truly quality eye rolls) and will the aforementioned bench into existence. Aziraphale had smiled gratefully at the demon, and Crowley had huffed, rolled his eyes once more, then sat down with his arms crossed, definitely not forcing down a dopey smile of his own.

“Hello,” Aziraphale started his usual cheery introduction, “and welcome to our Unsolved: Supernatural Q and A,” (at this he smiled and looked over at Crowley), “coming to you today from the great outdoors.”

“Mmhm,” Crowley hummed in agreement. “We’ve got a bunch of questions this week, so I’ll just jump straight in...” he grabbed his phone from his pocket and looked at the first on the list, “this one comes from Spooky Stuff on Twitter: ‘Loved the video, it was totally John moving those glasses! Do you think the story about the snake was true too?’”

Crowley, registering fully what he’d just read out, looked over to Aziraphale awkwardly. “I. Ah. Nope, totally not. Don’t believe in, witchcraft, me...”

“I’m sure that someone really did turn into a snake, but whether it was witchcraft or not we may never know,” Aziraphale offered.

From behind the camera, Newt called out: “Was it really you? The snake?”

Aziraphale laughed at Crowley’s expense. The demon himself huffed, then admitted: “Yes, yes, that was me. In my defence, though, a man at the bar said that he didn’t believe I _could_  turn into a snake, so obviously I had to prove him wrong. Was just, a bit too drunk to remember to keep everyone else from noticing, is all...”

“Must remember to delete this bit,” Aziraphale warned. “Anyway, what’s the next question?”

“Yes. Next one’s from Ghost Buster, also on Twitter, they want to know if we’re gonna do any episodes in the future where we go to spots with more evil ghosts, or demons,” Crowley read out. He looked at his phone for a few more seconds, then faced up to the camera with a deadpan expression. “I don’t believe in demons.”

“What Crowley means to say,” Aziraphale said with a stern look in the demon’s direction, as Newt had to turn away from the camera to muffle a surprised laugh, “is that we may go to such a place, if we hear of one. Can I read the next question?”

Crowley tossed the phone over to the angel. “Knock yourself out.”

“Right. Here we have one from Jared Nineteen. This one’s Twitter too - did you even look anywhere else, Crowley? Well, Jared asks: Aziraphale, how old are you? Are you up to date on the latest memes?”

Newt, having only recently regained composure, this time actually dropped the camera (which helpfully stayed floating in the air, naturally) upon hearing the way Aziraphale pronounced memes, or rather, me-mes.

Unaffected by Newt’s distraction, and Crowley next to him face-palming, Aziraphale continued: “I do know a thing or two about these Internet Me-mes. For example, I believe that L-O-L cats were popular recently?”

“That was years ago, angel,” Crowley corrected, face still covered by his palm. He moved his hand, miraculously not getting fingerprints smeared onto his sunglasses. “And it’s pronounced _meme_.”

“Ah. That’s a shame, I quite liked those cats,” Aziraphale frowned, and straightened out an imaginary crease in his jacket. “Well. Next question... it’s not much of a question, actually. It’s from Aziraley Stan, on Twitter, they say ‘you two are so married OMG’, and underneath is a screenshot of the video, the bit where we’re a bit drunk.”

“You really are married,” Newt said from behind the camera.

Crowley took the phone back from Aziraphale. “Not physically,” he commented. “Anyways let’s wrap this up, got a question from Facebook, since I _did_  look at other sites: ‘that was a lot of wine there, how did you not die of alcohol poisoning?’”

Once more, the demon looked up straight into the camera. “I’m a bad bitch, alcohol can’t kill me.”

Aziraphale shot Crowley a confused look. “We do both have a very high alcohol tolerance, yes... but I think it could actually kill us, if we managed to drink enough...”

“Whatever,” Crowley shrugged. “Tune in next time for another dumb location some idiots are calling haunted. Ciao.”

With that, the demon sauntered over to the camera and turned it off.

“Crowley, that wasn’t a very polite ending” Aziraphale admonished. He stood up off the bench, which miraculously disappeared, and went to collect the camera from Newt. “Thank you for your help,” he said, “If you want to be our cameraman next time too I’m sure Crowley can text you.”

Crowley affected a put-upon sigh, but agreed readily enough, and then the angel and demon were off on their way back to London.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: Newt’s opinion on scone pronunciation does NOT reflect my own you wouldn’t catch me rhyming scone with one.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again for all the comments and kudos, they really make my day when I see them :)  
> This chapter is another episode, this time from the point of view of Crowley and Aziraphale making it. Enjoy!

At the request of Ghost Buster, and also quite a few other fans on twitter, Aziraphale sought out the latest rumours of demonic activity. This was both easier and harder than you’d think: obviously, demonic activity was easy to spot, as an angel, particularly when the demon Crowley popped into your bookshop on a daily basis to pester you and tempt you to lunch and also cuddles because, fine, you admit it, you’re totally married; on the other hand, though, ‘Crowley Turns Into A Snake And Curls Up Round My Neck For Five Hours While I Try To Read’, well... actually, it would probably garner a lot of attention, but it would also reveal Crowley as a demon, which was not so good. So, Aziraphale had to find rumours of demonic activity that came purely from _human_  sources, which tended to end in a lot of fake claims and disappointment.

After a week of searching fruitlessly, the Principality was ready to just accept the next crackpot human’s fake demon story and run with it. Naturally, then, the next rumour he heard was the one that was, probably not down to any actual talent of the humans involved, completely true.

When asked whether he’d like to help out with filming the demon hunt, Newt decided that actually, he wasn’t that invested in a career as a cameraman, and he’d stick to hunting witches, so it was only Crowley and Aziraphale sat in the Bentley, ready to start recording.

“So, where are we this time, angel?”

Aziraphale huffed. “You’re supposed to welcome everyone back to another episode of Unsolved: Supernatural!” he complained. “We’re actually not that far away, though. Just take a right here, and carry on until...”

“St. James Park?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

Driving, as it was, at 90 miles per hour, the Bentley made short work of arriving just outside Crowley and Aziraphale’s favourite haunt. The demon slammed the brakes with only a few metres between the car and the park gates, and it took the combined work of demonic and angelic miracles to both avoid colliding with the gates (demonic), and for the 90-to-0 in 0.5 seconds speed change to not break the necks of the car’s two occupants (angelic). Discorporation successfully avoided, Crowley opened the door and stepped casually out to make his way to the park gates (about 2 inches away from the front of the Bentley). Aziraphale took a deep, steadying breath before opening his own side of the car, then stepped mostly steadily out of the vehicle, making sure the camera smoothly followed them as he did.

“So, what’s the haunting then, angel?” Crowley asked as Aziraphale joined him by the gate. “Is there a ghost that lurks in the pond at night, looking for the agent that fed him that poisoned bread?”

“No. There’s actually been reports of Demonic Activity!”

Crowley turned to Aziraphale, unimpressed. “That’s it? Oh wow, can’t believe there’s been _demons_  in this park. Stop the presses!” he said, throwing his arms out sarcastically. “Unheard of!”

“No,” Aziraphale interrupted, exasperated, “there’s been rumours that a demon comes out at night to curse those who dare enter the park after dark. He appears by one of the benches.”

“So, not me?” Crowley checked.

Aziraphale nodded.

Crowley spluttered. “Well, that’s -“ he managed between incomprehensible, offended noises, “- that’s. Rude’s what that is. Lurking? In _my_ park? How long has this been going on for?”

“Only recently,” Aziraphale assured, “since about. The eighties, I think.”

“That’s not _recent_ ,” Crowley grumbled. “Well, I won’t stand for it.”

With that, the demon jumped at the park gates, scaling them with perhaps the help of a small miracle to stop his feet slipping off the bars. He made short work of getting to the top, balanced himself precariously on the spikes at the top of the metal railing, then hopped down to land in a crouch.

“C’mon angel!” he shouted, managing to saunter briskly, somehow, off into the dark.

Aziraphale pulled a face, looking between the swiftly disappearing Crowley and the floating camera in indecision. After a few seconds, the camera set off after the demon, switching to night vision mode as it slipped through the park gates and out of the dim street lighting.

“Wait for me!” the angel called out, snapping his fingers to open the park gates and dashing through them, making sure to miracle them closed again too (lest some human wander in and get involved in the demonic standoff that was sure to occur once Crowley found the haunted bench). “You don’t even know where you’re going!”

———

It took ten minutes of running (well, jogging (well, speed walking with occasional breaks to catch his breath)) around in the park, shouting Crowley’s name, before Aziraphale had the bright idea to just go to the bench that the two usually shared when they had their ‘secret’ meetings. Sure enough, Crowley was there, tapping his foot impatiently. Next to him, the camera was floating, also impatiently.

“Finally!” Crowley said in lieu of greeting. “So, where’s this damned - blessed - bench, then?”

Aziraphale pointed two benches down. “There,” he said.

“Great.” Crowley marched over to the offending bench, and sat down on it heavily.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s get on with it, then.”

“On with what?” Aziraphale asked, also sitting on the bench. The camera dutifully set itself up a few feet away, and started up recording again.

“The episode,” Crowley revealed impatiently. “You know, all that stuff you like to say before we get on with the actual trying to talk to ghosts.”

“Oh, right.” Aziraphale smiled, then straightened out his jacket. “Yes. Welcome back, finally managed to find Crowley again -“ the demon had the cheek to wink at the camera, at that, “- so it’s time to go over what exactly makes this bench so... demonic.

“Most people who’ve been in the park at night have reported strange noises emanating from this area. Those brave enough to investigate have told tales of a terrifying beast, beyond description.”

“Mm, sounds real scary,” Crowley commented. “Well, that’s enough information. I think it’s time to show this ‘demon’ who’s boss.”

And so Crowley stood up on the bench, and shouted: “This is my bench now, whoever you are! You hear me?”

Aziraphale jumped slightly at the sudden increase in volume, and backed away from the bench. “Now, you might not want to draw attention to yourself, actually, dear,” he cautioned.

“Property of Anthony J Crowley, this bench!” Crowley continued, undeterred. “Belongs to -“

And then Crowley stopped talking, because he had just noticed that the grass beside the bench was shaking. After a few moments, the ground parted as two small tufts of hair shaped vaguely into horns appeared from the dirt, followed by the rest of the demon, one who was surprisingly hygienic and not-disgusting for a denizen of hell. Plus they didn’t have a frog on their head or anything.

Aziraphale, who had let out a small ‘eep’ when he first saw the dirt shifting, looked over to Crowley for guidance. He didn’t recognise this particular demon, but guessed that they couldn’t be too far up the food chain in hell, based on Crowley’s lack of fear.

“Who dares try to claim my bench?” the demon spoke, in a voice that may possibly work to scare a human, especially after the entrance they’d just made, but to Crowley and Aziraphale was clearly a rather badly faked low voice, almost comedic in how deep it was trying to be.

“That’d be me,” Crowley said, pointing to himself with a grin.

“Foolish mortal,” the demon began, using a bit of their demonic power to bring their wings into existence. Again, this could be very spooky to a human, the sudden appearance of not-quite-physically-present wings, dark and menacing and the like. The demon raised his head up, dark eyes glinting unnaturally. “I shall - Crowley?”

Just like that, the demon lost all pretences of horror, their wings disappearing and their body beginning to tremble just slightly.

Crowley grinned, lowering his sunglasses for just a second to flash his fully yellow eyes at the demon. “Yup.”

“Ah, well, um,” the demon seemed to be trying to disappear into their, frankly quite fashionable, scarf. “As I was saying, Crowley, sir, this bench, is, um, I was... just warming it for you! Yes, and you can have it, of course, since it’s yours, and all... umm... bye!”

Without further ado, the demon disappeared right back into the earth they’d come from.

“What a strange fellow...” Aziraphale remarked, stepping up to examine the displaced grass.

Crowley gave the spot the other demon had been in an cursory tap with his foot. He glanced over at the camera, then announced: “Hired actor, clearly.” Then, before Aziraphale could react, “And that wraps up today’s... not-solved-whatever-thing. Pretty sure we did actually solve that it’s all a load of nonsense, but whatever.”

“What do you think they were doing here?” Aziraphale wondered as the camera turned itself off.

“Haven’t the foggiest,” Crowley admitted.

“Poor dear was quite frightened by you, weren’t they?”

Crowley shrugged. “I’ve gained a bit of a reputation, among the lesser demons,” he explained, miracling the camera back to the Bentley. “What with all the commendations I get from hell. Suppose the holy water incident can’t have helped with that.”

“Probably not,” Aziraphale agreed guiltily.

“Oh, come on, angel,” Crowley sighed, noticing Aziraphale’s expression. “They’re a _demon_. You’re not supposed to feel sorry for them.”

“Yes,” the angel agreed, not looking any less guilty. “I suppose you’re right.”

———

On an average day, Crowley would arrive at the bookshop somewhere between 9 and 11am, and hang around in Aziraphale’s general vicinity with exceptional patience until about 12, at which point he would engage in some light temptation that usually ended in the Ritz or some other fancy and or obscure restaurant in the area. So, Crowley arriving at just past 11 wasn’t too far out of the ordinary. It was, however, a bit strange that immediately after waltzing through the door, he announced: “Demon disco,” apropos of nothing.

Understandably, Aziraphale found himself somewhat confused. “I beg your pardon?”

“Demon disco,” Crowley repeated, grinning. “It’s what Eric - the demon from last night - was doing with the bench.”

“Disco... with a bench?”

“No! Disco with a bunch of other demons. Mostly just Eric and their clones, actually. Gets a bit crowded in hell, so they decided to take the party up to Earth.”

“Oh.” Aziraphale said, not looking nearly so pleased as his demon partner. “So they were just trying to have fun.”

“On _my_  bench, though! In _my_  park!” Crowley flopped down onto a sofa that had until that moment been in the back room. “So, I... toldErictheycouldusethebandstand.”

“You what?”

“Told Eric that if they wanted to have any further raves, the bandstand would probably be a better place for it.”

Aziraphale softened. “I knew you were...” he stopped as Crowley started glaring at him, and sat himself down next to the demon on the sofa.

“Wasn’t that good a deed, anyway,” Crowley, apparently having forgiven Aziraphale’s almost-compliment, leant himself against the angel as soon as he was settled - placing his head in Aziraphale’s lap, and dangling his legs over the arm of the sofa. “Replaced all his music with Best of Queen albums.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: the intro to the script book says that the ‘disposable demon’, aka the poor demon who kept getting killed by Hastur, is called Eric. There’s three of them in that episode but I like the idea that somewhere out there there’s just a whole army of Erics.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A bit of a deviation from the youtube videos format today; I got caught up on the idea of demon disco and this happened.  
> Thanks for the comments / kudoses and enjoy!

When Hell decided to communicate with Crowley, their preferred method of doing so was to possess whatever the nearest electrical item that had speakers was, and talk through that. It had been some time, therefore, since any kind of demonic communication had come in written form. So, when Crowley found an actual letter, delivered by an actual postman (presumably, at least: Crowley didn’t keep a 24 hour surveillance on his letterbox), his first assumption was _not_  that he’d just got a letter from Hell. It wasn’t until he opened up the letter, and read (with some effort - Hell isn’t well known for neat handwriting) it that he realised.

“Fucking...” Crowley muttered, shoving the letter back into the envelope and then the envelope into his pocket, “hell works actually. Fucking hell.”

Then he checked his watch - 7am was close enough to 9am, right? - and set off to for Aziraphale.

———

Crowley had long since stopped caring about petty things like knocking on the bookshop door, or paying attention to the closed sign, or the fact that the door was locked and he had no key. So, at about five minutes past seven on a fine Wednesday morning, Crowley slammed the door open, causing quite a few shelves to shake enough to knock loose some decades-old (or perhaps a few months old, given the whole Magically Regenerated Post The Fire thing) dust.

Aziraphale heard the commotion from the back room and came out to investigate.

“Crowley,” he said cheerfully, “you’re early, dear.”

“Got a letter. From Hell.”

The angel’s face dropped. “Sounds serious,” he said, hurrying over to where Crowley was retrieving the offending correspondence from his jacket, “what does it say? Did they figure out our ruse?”

“No,” Crowley said, shoving the envelope into Aziraphale’s hands for the angel to further examine, before summoning his favourite sofa from the back room to flop down onto, “worse.”

“What could possibly be -“ Aziraphale stopped himself, dedicating his attention instead to the badly scrawled words in front of him. “Hello Mr Crowley, sir,” he read, “thanks for the hint about the bandstand, and for the new CDs. It’s far better than what we had before. We’re having another disco on Wednesday night, with snacks, and were wondering if you would like to come too. If you want. Please don’t melt me. From Eric.”

Crowley nodded along at the words. “Terrible, isn’t it?”

“Terrible?” Aziraphale echoed incredulously. “You had me all worried over nothing! This is a good thing! I’d been feeling quite bad about kicking poor Eric off their bench,” he said, in a tone that implied a confession despite that having been patently obvious to Crowley and also everyone in the comments section of the video in question, “it’s good to know they’re having a nice time.”

Crowley sighed dramatically. Of course, Azirapahle may be a bit of a bastard but he was still soft enough to care about these lower-tiered demons.

“Wednesday...” Aziraphale said, reading over the message again, “well, that’s today. Must remember to go.”

Crowley sat up on the sofa, staring at Aziraphale. “Go? No, angel,”

But Aziraphale wasn’t listening. “A demon disco,” he was saying, lost in imagining such an event, “I’ve heard that demons dance. Don’t get that in heaven...”

Crowley sighed. That did it, then. “Fine, fine, we can go.”

Aziraphale perked up immediately. “Really?” he said, “that’s wonderful! Well, since you’re early today, why don’t we go for a spot of breakfast? I know a great new café opened a few streets away, their full English is simply _devine_...”

Fuck, Crowley thought to himself as Aziraphale rambled on about sausages and hash browns, I’ve been played. Again.

———

It was with great reluctance that Crowley drove round to the bandstand later that evening. Meanwhile, Aziraphale, who had unbeknownst to Crowley been practising his gavotte for the last few hours, was practically bouncing in his seat.

By the time they actually arrived, Aziraphale was full on grinning, with Crowley scowling with equal intensity.

The demon quickly picked out the closest of the Erics (not especially difficult given that a good seventy percent of the disco-goers were in fact a member of the group Crowley had been internally referring to as Eric and the Erics) and marched up to them. “Well, we’re here,” he said shortly, and before he could attempt to make any kind of pleasantries, Eric started babbling.

“Ah! Mr Crowley, sir, I’m sorry, is this your bandstand? Eric said we could have it, but, if you want -“

Crowley sighed. “You’re not the Eric who sent the letter, are you,” he said, Eric stopping their stream of words as soon as Crowley opened his mouth.

“A letter? No, not me, please don’t kill me I didn’t -“

“How do you not know about it?” Crowley interrupted impatiently. “I thought you guys had... a hive-mind or something.”

“... No, we don’t”

Crowley lowered his glasses, giving the Eric a speculative look. The shorter demon started shrinking into the ground. “Well,” he said, “you should work on that,” and then sauntered off over to the bandstand itself.

“Really, Crowley,” Aziraphale said disapprovingly as the two came in range of the speakers, and were able to hear Freddie Mercury’s singing in the background, “you shouldn’t scare them like that.”

“Shouldn’t scare them,” Crowley repeated mockingly, voice low enough that the sound of Killer Queen drowned it out. “Fine,” he continued, louder this time, and then made a beeline for the new nearest Eric, who was stood inside the bandstand near a collapsible table containing snacks.

“Oh, Crowley!” the Eric, who was indeed the letter-sender, and also the host of the party, grinned, “You came!”

“Yes,” Crowley said, giving the table a cursory glance and judging the food unfit for even demon consumption, “so you can tell all the other Erics and whoever else to stop being so jumpy around me.” Then he turned back over to Aziraphale. “Happy now?”

“Delighted,” the angel confirmed. Killer Queen drew to a close, and Aziraphale looked over at the gaggle of (badly) dancing demons. “Shall we?”

“Go on then,” Crowley agreed. “So, what dance is all the rage in heaven nowadays? Can’t say I remember ever seeing an angel dance.”

“Oh, we don’t, usually,” Aziraphale said, leading the way to where about fifteen Erics and a few other demons were taking a momentary pause in their dance, waiting for the next song to start up. “But, well, while you were taking that century long nap... I got bored. Learnt the gavotte.”

“The gavotte?” Crowley had a vague recollection of such a dance from when he’d looked over what he missed in the 19th century. He wasn’t sure what to make of Aziraphale’s sole dance style. “Not really a disco dance, is it?” he asked.

As if to back up this claim, the opening chords to Don’t Stop Me Now started playing.

“Then again,” he continued, looking over to where the Erics were dancing with almost unnerving synchronisation, “I don’t think Freddie envisioned the Macarena as the dance someone might choose for his music...”

“Do you know it?” Aziraphale asked, “The gavotte?”

“Nah,” Crowley shrugged, “I tend to stick to whatever the latest dance craze is. I actually had a hand in creating the current one.”

Anyone else wouldn’t have noticed the way the angel deflated slightly at those words. “It’s more fun with other people,” he said, “but I suppose I could do it solo...”

“Well, I’ll teach you my dancing, and you can teach me the gavotte,” Crowley said.

“Oh, really?” Aziraphale immediately brightened, and once again Crowley cursed his constant urge to make the angel as happy as possible. It was truly inconvenient. “That would be wonderful.”

The two fell silent, then, as the tempo started to pick up, and Aziraphale launched into a rusty, yet still recognisable, and most definitely over enthusiastic gavotte; the Erics’ Macarena picked up in pace; the other demons switched from the Shopping Trolley to Chicken on a Treadmill; and Crowley began flossing.

“What’s that dance?” Aziraphale called out after about a minute of Crowley flossing at high speed.

“It’s from a video game,” Crowley said, pausing for a moment, “Fortnite, another of my greats. It has a bunch of dances, actually,” he continued, and started up another classic, pumping one first back and forth while kicking the opposite leg. “Sparks a rage response in anyone above the age of twelve.”

Aziraphale by this point had run out of gavotte, and was stood in his finishing pose, pleased as punch.

“How do you do it?” the angel asked, gesturing at Crowley, who was now engaged in an expertly pulled off victory dance.

Cowley obligingly stopped and reverted back to flossing, this time going at a much slower speed. “Just move your arms like this,” he explained, “and your hips in kind of... the opposite direction.”

As the song hit its bridge, Aziraphale began a clumsy attempt at copying. He was, technically, moving his arms from side to side and his hips in the opposite direction, but he was missing the somewhat vital step of moving his arms in a backwards diagonal, and his hips forwards to match, so really all he’d achieved was an advanced sort of wiggle.

“I’m doing it!” the angel beamed, looking up at Crowley, who couldn’t help but smile back.

“You’re a natural. Now how about you teach me to gavotte?”

And so for the for the next few minutes, Aziraphale slowly ran through the multiple steps and leg kicks and arm-linking that made up the gavotte with Crowley. By the time the demon was getting the hang of it, We Are the Champions had come and gone, and they were now gavotting to We Will Rock You. In this time, the Erics had not deviated from their dedication to the Macarena, and the other demons had gone through several dad dance classics, with a brief pause in which they all dabbed at one another for a while.

As the song transitioned into the much slower Love of My Life, the latest gavotte attempt came to an end with Aziraphale and Crowley both stood with their arms out, crossed over one another. The angel dropped out of the position with slightly heavier breathing.

“Should we go investigate the food?” Aziraphale suggested, looking back at the table, which had gone mostly untouched all evening.

“It’s Hell cuisine,” Crowley warned, but followed Aziraphale over to the table anyway, “the only food that exists down there is... well...”

There was no point in finishing that remark, as Aziraphale discovered exactly what Crowley meant before the demon could summon the right word. Aziraphale had gone to pick up a pork pie, only to stop, having hovering just above it, and watch on in horror as a maggot wriggled out of the meat.

“All food in Hell is like this?” Aziraphale asked faintly, drawing his hand back away from the pie.

“Trust me, they brought the best stuff.”

And that was how Crowley found himself leading an honest-to-someone conga line of demons, to the tune of A Kind Of Magic, to the Bentley. Well, thankfully he’d been spared the indignity of actually _joining_  the conga, instead letting Aziraphale be at the front of the line and walking next to him. The conga line broke up demon by demon as they all loaded into the car, and thankfully it didn’t occur to a single one of them that approximately twenty demons had no business fitting in the space of a bench that should seat three without having to shrink themselves, so it didn’t occur to the Bentley either. It also didn’t cross anyone’s mind that maybe the Ritz wouldn’t be open so late in the night, or that there wouldn’t be a table for twenty two anywhere in the restaurant, so either by happy coincidence or demonic intervention, when the car rolled up outside the restaurant to the final notes of Bohemian Rhapsody, it was open and had the space.

Any passers-by were thus treated to the sight of twenty demons exiting the one Bentley as if they’d all been stacked in there, clown car style. The many Erics and few non-Erics filed into the Ritz happily enough, and despite some small confusions over the menu (most of them not having heard of much of what was on offer), managed to enjoy a surprisingly civilised meal.

“That was scrumptious,” Aziraphale commented happily as he finished off his desert, “just what I needed after all that dancing. I’d forgotten how much the gavotte can work up an appetite.”

Crowley nodded, sipping at his coffee and watching the other demons as they sat in awe of food that actually tasted nice. The fact that Aziraphale, the angel, had just successfully tempted them all to this meal, was not lost on him. “Home time, then?”

Aziraphale agreed, and the two started the task of herding their fellow disco goers out into the street, where each demon disappeared back into the street in turn. When the final Eric stepped out, he turned to Crowley and said: “This has been the best disco ever. You should really come again some time!” before he too vanished back to Hell, leaving Crowley and Aziraphale to climb into the Bentley.

“That was fun,” Aziraphale said as Crowley pulled out from the kerb, “those demons were rather nice, weren’t they? Honestly, much better company than...” he trailed off, pointing upwards.

Crowley laughed. “I’m pretty sure angels aren’t supposed to like demons more than their fellow angels, angel,” he said, pulling up to the bookshop.

“Well,” Aziraphale said, looking over at Crowley with a smile, “I’ve been failing at that for a good while now, dear,” then he stepped out and gestured to the bookshop. “Drinks?”

Crowley nodded, and followed the angel inside.

It was a few hours and a few too many glasses of wine later, by which point the sun was rising, that Crowley decided to engage in his favourite of human activities.

“It’s bedtime,” he announced, making no effort to stand from where he was lying, half on Aziraphale and half on the sofa.

Aziraphale nodded drunkenly, and despite having a bed upstairs, decided to miracle the sofa for convenience. Drunk as he was, the bed was a little lopsided, but it was serviceable. “There y’go,” he murmured, smushing his face into the pillow.

Indulging his more snakelike instincts, Crowley wriggled under the covers until he was pressed against the warmth of Aziraphale, giving the angel a full bodied hug. As he drifted off into a short (relative to his occasional week or perhaps century long sleep times) nap, Crowley decided that perhaps the demon disco hadn’t been such a bad idea after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Crowley would 100% Fortnite dance and you can’t convince me otherwise.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We return to the regularly scheduled youtube video format today with a QnA for the demonic bench vid. The events of this one directly follow where last chapter left off.  
> As usual thanks for the feedback, and enjoy!

Aziraphale wasn’t really one for sleeping, and generally sobered himself up whenever Crowley left for bed on any night they spent drinking. As such, in his 6000 years of existence on Earth, he’d had very little occasion to sleep while still drunk. This meant that when the angel awoke at 11am on a fine Thursday morning, he awoke to the first hangover he’d ever experienced. His sleep-addled brain didn’t consider the option of miracling the headache away, so Aziraphale simply groaned, and pulled the covers further over his head.

Crowley, meanwhile, was far more used to hangovers, and had miracled his own away as soon as he’d awoken. He’d spent a while enjoying the hug that the sleeping angel was giving him, then had slithered out of bed without waking Aziraphale, and popped off down the street to buy some pastries for breakfast. He returned just in time to watch Aziraphale awaken.

“Satan’s sake, angel, you’re an _angel_ ,” Crowley said, yanking the covers back and enjoying the way Aziraphale’s face scrunched up when exposed to daylight. “Just do a miracle.”

It took a few seconds, but eventually Aziraphale managed to do so, and then promptly sat up properly on the previously-a-sofa bed. Crowley took a moment to appreciate that the angel had failed to miracle away his rumpled clothes and bedhead, then handed him a pain au chocolat and sat down to enjoy his croissant.

“Thank you,” Aziraphale said once he’d finished, miracling up a napkin to dab at his mouth with. “So, any plans for today?”

“Thought we could do the QnA for the demon bench episode,” Crowley suggested, “There’s been a lot of discussion about that one online.”

Aziraphale sat in contemplation for a second, then got out of the makeshift bed and let it regain its sofa form. Disappointingly, he also de-rumpled his hair and clothes while he was at it. “Sure, shall we do it here, or at your flat?”

Crowley shrugged, giving up on his croissant, which Aziraphale promptly started eating.

“Let’s go to yours,” Aziraphale decided. “It’s a nice day; we could walk there, get an ice cream.”

——

The pair took a short trip in the Bentley (Crowley was never one to pass up on an opportunity to park illegally) to the park, where they each got their favoured ice cream, and they had just finished eating when they were approached by a random woman.

“Excuse me,” she said, distracting Crowley from his hunt for a bin to put the ice lolly stick in (he may be a demon, but he’d decided that littering was a step too far), “are you Aziraphale and Crowley?”

“Uh, yes,” Crowley said, suspicious - it wasn’t every day that he was approached by a human, especially one he didn’t know, and _especially_  one who, despite this, knew him.

The woman grinned. “I thought so,” she said, “I watch your youtube videos,” (Crowley relaxed a little; that explained it), “big fan. I was wondering if I could get a selfie?”

Well. Crowley _had_  invented selfies; he felt obligated to encourage the taking of them whenever possible. “Sure,” he said, and the woman grinned even wider, taking out her phone.

“Selfie?” Aziraphale repeated, confused, as Crowley and the fan, who was now introducing herself as Jane, got into position.

“A picture, angel,” Crowley explained, grabbing Aziraphale’s shoulders and positioning him so that devil and angel were stood with their arms over each other’s shoulders, and Jane stood in front, holding her phone out as far as her arms would allow.

“Say cheese!” Jane said, prompting Aziraphale to give Crowley a confused glance, and Crowley to stare into the camera with a straight face, though he also gave the camera a peace sign with the hand not currently on Aziraphale’s shoulder. “Thanks!” Jane stepped away from the two and inspected the photo. “Do you mind if I put this on twitter?”

“Knock yourself out,” Crowley said. Then, spotting a bin for his rubbish, he walked off, leaving Aziraphale to hastily give a goodbye before the angel could follow after him.

Aziraphale gave Crowley a look which clearly stated his opinion on the rude exit, but decided against vocalising it. “Onto the flat?”

———

Once in Crowley’s flat, and safe from being recognised by any more fans, it was time to sort through the questions for the video. While scrolling through their tag, Crowley found the picture from the park, which had been posted with the caption ‘look who I ran into today!’ and tagged with #theyretotallymarried. Crowley liked the post, smiling at Aziraphale’s confused expression, then continued his search for questions.

Before long, they had a selection of the most asked questions screenshotted and ready to be answered. Crowley got the camera out, setting it in front of his stylish but uncomfortable sleek leather sofa, and, once Aziraphale had settled down on it, pressed record.

“Hello,” Aziraphale started the usual introduction, “and welcome to the Unsolved: Supernatural Q and A.”

“Our first question has been asked by quite a few people on Twitter,” Crowley said, scrolling through the photos on his phone until he found the post he’d decided to read out: “and that is, ‘how come the demon knew Crowley? I bet he’s secretly the King of Hell’.”

Aziraphale, who hadn’t seen the exact wording of that particular post, frowned. “King of Hell? Crowley isn’t Satan.”

“Other theories suggest I’ve been possessed,” Crowley offered.

Aziraphale affected a look of contemplation. “Well... I _do_  know a thing or two about possession... you never know, maybe they’re right.”

Crowley laughed. “Yes, this body is possessed. By _me_. It’s my body.” (Once the video was released, this clip would be quoted quite extensively, with captions of ‘that’s what a demon possessing a man would say though’, followed by the side-eye emoji, or some variation thereupon.) “Ah, and here’s a question from someone with a bit more sense: ‘You guys wildin’ if you think that’s not an actor. Nice effect with the coming out of the ground, though, how’d you manage it?’”

“How _do_  you do that?” Aziraphale asked, “It’s quite impressive, definitely gives off menacing vibes.”

Crowley grinned. “That’s for me to know and you to never find out.”

“... How about another question?” Aziraphale took the phone, flipping through the screenshots. “Oh!” he said, “this is that selfie that nice lady from before - Jenna? Jade?”

“Jane,” Crowley supplied, cheeks slightly pink.

“Yes, Jane.” Aziraphale smiled. “This is quite a nice picture. Though, I wish I’d been smiling...”

“Yes, yes,” Crowley snapped, “C’mon, find a question already.”

“Ah, yes, how about... oh, this is a nice one. ‘Crowley, your Bentley is in excellent condition. Where did you find it?’”

“Car dealership just outside London in 1926,” Crowley answered honestly. Then, realising that that answer was perhaps a bit suspect, he corrected: “Actually, only got it a month or so ago,” which was, technically, given the car’s tragic demise and subsequent revival at the hands of the antichrist, not a falsehood, “Custom made to be the exact same as a new Bentley in ‘26. It was a favour from a, uhh... friend,” Crowley paused for a moment, pointedly _not_  thinking about how he’d ended up with the 11 year old antichrist as at least an acquaintance, if not a friend, “so not anything anyone else could get.”

“Oh, I like this question,” Aziraphale, who had been fiddling with Crowley’s phone while the demon was speaking, said, “I’ve found several people who want to know: ‘why’s Crowley... “so fudging extra”... that he jumped the gates? They weren’t even locked.”

“Hey!” Crowley said, snatching his phone back, “that wasn’t one of the agreed - you went back on Twitter!” Aziraphale flashed him an innocent smile. “And it says ‘fucking’, not ‘fudging’... anyway, it’s not like I _knew_  that the gates were open,” (this translated, naturally, to ‘I forgot that I could miracle gates open), “besides, it’s more fun that way. Right,” he said, scrolling at top speed, “now it’s my turn. ‘Aziraphale, how on Earth do you not know what a meme is in the year of our Lord two thousand and nineteen?’”

Aziraphale flushed. “I know what a meme _is_ ,” he said, nailing the pronunciation this time, “I just don’t exactly know what the latest memes are. Actually,” he dug through his pocket for his own phone, “You’ve been helping me there, Crowley,” he unlocked the device and went to his messages. “I have it on good authority that the image of the woman trying to explain something to her friend is hip right now.”

“The word ‘hip’ isn’t hip anymore, but sure,” Crowley allowed. “Right, onto the next question... ‘what’s the J for’?, Aziraphale, did you make a Twitter?”

“Quite a few people are asking it, actually,” Aziraphale defended. “What does it stand for, though, really?”

Crowley glared at the camera, which obediently paused the recording, before admitting: “Janthony.”

Aziraphale laughed. “Janthony? Really?”

“I got drunk!” Crowley crossed his arms and glared at the angel. “I bet the Z in A. Z. Fell stands for Zanthony.”

“It’s actually just an A and a Z. Anyway, shall we continue?”

The camera turned back on, and Crowley returned to the approved list of questions. “Okay, last one... how about ‘Hey Aziraphale, where did you find rumours of the demon?’ Good question, honestly; I thought you only had Shadwell, and there’s no way _he_  knew anything.”

“I went online, actually,” Aziraphale said, pleased as punch at his own technological expertise, “onto an internet forum, where people discussed sightings of supernatural activity.”

Crowley gave an impressed hum. “Well, that’s all for this week. Tune in next time to see me stand off with another hired actor - I mean, demon.”

Once the camera switched itself off, Aziraphale turned to Crowley with a smile. “That’s enough productivity for one day,” he decided. “Cup of tea?”

“Sure.” Crowley stood, the camera following him as he made his way to his desk, where his laptop lay conveniently open and turned on, ready to edit the video.

From the kitchen the sound of the kettle coming to boil rang out, swiftly followed by the much quieter (yet still audible throughout the echoing empty rooms of the flat) sound of pouring water. As Aziraphale came in with two mugs of tea, a quick miracle changed Crowley’s throne of a desk chair into a larger bench-throne, with a few cushions (still fitting the bold red of the chair’s back) thrown in for extra comfort. Aziraphale picked up on this incredibly subtle hint, and sat down at the bench as he placed the tea on miracled-up coasters (which did _not_ , tartan patterned as they were, fit the theme of the room).

Crowley clicked idly at his video editor as Aziraphale gently leant into the demon. (Crowley liked to tease Aziraphale on his lack of tech proficiency, but his own use of the computer only worked because the object would simply do what he expected it to, rather than any knowledge of what buttons should actually be pressed. This made Crowley the unwitting envy of computer coders everywhere.)

It took not much longer than an hour for the video to come together, at which point Crowley saved it for later uploading. By now Aziraphale was wrapped up so much in the hug he was giving Crowley that one would be forgiven for assuming that, of the two, it was the angel who occasionally spent time as a snake. To disabuse anyone of such a notion, Crowley slowly (as not to let Aziraphale lose balance) returned to snake form, and wrapped himself into a nice scarf while he was at it.

Aziraphale smiled fondly at the snake, who was already dozing in a display of true talent in sleepiness. “You can’t go to sleep now; we haven’t had dinner yet, dear.”

Crowley gave Aziraphale a look which perfectly communicated how he felt about _that_.

“Oh, alright,” the angel said, standing up and letting his usual clothes transform into comfy pyjamas, “but we’re getting up early for a big breakfast.” Aziraphale walked - carefully, as not to jostle Crowley too much - to the bedroom, bemoaning all the while the demon’s recent tempting him to sleep, making him all used to going to bed. He slid onto the bed, the only comfortable piece of furniture in the whole flat (all the better to commit Sloth with), and was asleep within minutes, with a contently napping snake round his shoulders.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me in previous chapters: does whatever’s funniest  
> Me in this chapter: does whatever’s cutest  
> Also yes, I’m team Firm Believer That The J Stands For Janthony.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a True Crime chapter. It’s based vaguely on historical facts in that Arkwright was a real guy who really built mills, but the actual crime element is fully made up.  
> Thanks for all the kudoses and enjoy!

As much as Anathema had been against the concept of Aziraphale and Crowley’s new youtuber careers, she had to admit that their videos were pretty good. So, with her duties as a professional descendent finished, and her lack of job thanks to several well timed investments (thanks Agnes) on her family’s part making the Devices filthy rich, she’d found herself going through the small collection of videos that existed on the channel. Prior to the set of videos that were still being created, the supernatural duo had created a series focused on historical crimes, rather than the occult, and today Anathema had finally run out of ghost hunting videos to watch. It may not have lined up with her interests quite as much as the other videos, but with nothing better to do, the witch pressed play.

Immediately she was faced with a title card, announcing the series as Unsolved: True Crime, which soon cut to the interior of what Anathema assumed to be Aziraphale’s bookshop. Surrounded by shelves upon shelves of books, both Crowley and Aziraphale were sat on a comfortable but worn looking sofa, with a coffee table in front of them upon which several pages of notes were placed.

“Hello,” Aziraphale greeted with a welcoming smile, “and welcome to Unsolved: True Crime, a series where my companion,” upon being mentioned, Crowley gave the camera a wink and a smile, “and I will be exploring unsolved crimes throughout history, and presenting evidence and theories as to what may have happened.”

“I’m Crowley, and this is Aziraphale,” Crowley introduced, “and I have no clue what crime angel’s found for us.”

“You’ll like this one, it took place in one of your favourite places.”

Crowley frowned. “There was a crime in your shop? And it didn’t get solved?”

“No, dear,” Aziraphale’s face reddened slightly, “I meant Manchester.”

“Ohh, Manchester. Yeah, stroke of genius that place. Real work of art.”

“Quite,” Aziraphale said agreeably, reaching for the table to grab some of his notes. “Well, on with the crime.”

With those words, the video cut to an image of an old map.

“It took place in the late 18th century, in, as mentioned, the then-town of Manchester,” Aziraphale’s voice came over the image, which, via cleverly interpreting the contextual clues, Anathema deduced was a map of 18th century Manchester. “Where Arkwright was due to build the first mill in the area, which would spark the rapid development of the town into the city we know today.”

The video cut back to the bookshop, where Crowley was nodding along to everything Aziraphale had just said, a smile on his face that Anathema read as prideful.

“Good old Arkwright,” the demon grinned. “Barely took any convincing to get him on board.”

After that confusing-to-the-uninitiated statement, a drawing of a stereotypical 18th century man appeared.

“Our victim was called Thaddeus Deep, and he didn’t share your enthusiasm for industry, Crowley,” as Aziraphale spoke, the name appeared underneath the drawing. “In fact, he was rather against Arkwright’s plans. Vocally, too.”

Once again, Anathema was treated to the image of the angel and demon sharing a sofa. In this shot, Crowley’s smile had dropped from his face.

“Yes. Deep,” he said.

“He was actually trying to petition against the construction,” Aziraphale continued, not noticing, as Anathema’s Agnes-given intuition had allowed her to see, that Crowley probably knew this Deep character. “And he was doing quite well at getting public opinion on his side, which is where the story gets interesting.”

The angel turned to his partner. “You see,” he said, in a tone that just missed out on being conspiratorial for being too excited, “just when it seemed that Deep might be about to make a real difference, he started complaining about threats against his person.

“None of this was ever confirmed, but many reports of Deep talking about people telling him to back off start to surface, then he started saying that he was being followed, haunted by someone, though no one ever saw the man Deep described - sharply dressed, watching him from the shadows, could never make out his facial features, except that he wore spectacles. A few days after that, the man seemed to go mad, rambling about strange visions to anyone who would listen, until, not even a week later, he vanished.”

“Mmm,” Crowley said unenthusiastically. “Super mysterious.”

“I know!” Aziraphale reached out happily for a different stack of notes. “Okay, now: time to go through some theories!”

The video cut to black, and ‘Theory One’ faded into view soon after in white text.

“Our first, and most popular theory, is that Arkwright himself had a hand in the disappearance,” the text on screen was replaced by a painting of Arkwright, “which is quite sensible, really: the timing is just too perfect not to be suspicious. Deep starts his campaign against Arkwright, the effort starts to gain traction, and then within the year Deep vanishes? Definitely odd.”

“Mm,” Crowley hummed as the bookshop came back into view, “sure is. So, case closed then, right? Arkwright did it, kinda obvious, we can all go home, end of video?”

“Not quite.”

Crowley smiled. “You don’t say,” he said, then reached behind the sofa and produced a bottle of wine, and two glasses. The demon poured both himself and his partner a glass, and took a large sip of his own drink before continuing: “So, what’s wrong? Why doesn’t this theory hold?”

“Lack of evidence,” Aziraphale shrugged, grabbing his own wine glass, “There was never a body, Arkwright had an alibi for the night. As much sense as it makes, I don’t think he did it.”

“Yeah, me neither,” Crowley agreed. “So, what else have our good 1700s Mancunians come up with then?”

The words ‘theory two’ flashed on screen, and Anathema wondered whether Aziraphale would catch on to Crowley knowing more than he let on, or if the demon would end up just admitting it to him. Either one was equally likely, she figured, it was just a matter of which came first.

“Our second theory is a less sinister proposition; that Deep simply had some sort of mental breakdown, and fled the town. He was, after all, complaining of seeing dreadful things, showing signs of paranoia and such. It could be that he simply decided to leave town himself.”

“Sounds likely,” said Crowley, in a tone that made it clear to Anathema that this was in fact closer to the truth. It also decreased her patience for Aziraphale’s obliviousness significantly. “You have the evidence, so why don’t we like this one?”

“It’s just too big of a coincidence,” Aziraphale explained. “I refuse to believe that this convenient of a timing wasn’t orchestrated by _somebody_ , even if it couldn’t have been Arkwright. But no one else stands out as suspicious.”

Crowley’s eyebrows raised. “Yeah I sure do... wonder... who it could possibly be...”

At this point, Anathema was shaking her phone and shouting “he obviously did it you idiot!” at her phone screen. Surprisingly enough, this didn’t help the Aziraphale of the past any in sleuthing out who dunnit.

“So do I,” the angel on the screen replied sincerely. “I also wonder where he could’ve gone, if this theory is true. The name Thaddeus Deep doesn’t come up in any historical records in England again, or at least not at any time that it could have been our missing man. It’s this complete lack of trace of Deep that leads us onto our final theory.”

Once more, the number of the theory flashed on screen. When the shot returned to the two on the sofa, Crowley was pouring himself another drink.

Aziraphale finished off his glass, holding it out for Crowley to refill, then said: “This last theory is a bit... out there,” looking slightly embarrassed as he did.

Crowley sat up straighter, immediately more interested. “Oh? Do tell.”

“Some people, who’ve been looking into it nowadays, think it might have been... aliens.”

“Aliens?” Crowley spluttered, halfway through a sip of wine and regretting it now. “Angel, you know as well as I do that that’s -“

“It’s what people _think_!” Aziraphale defended.

“Clearly this one doesn’t make any _logical_  sense, so there must be some pretty good evidence to back it up, eh?”

“Well...” Aziraphale shuffled through his notes as though they would provide him with some sort of proof. “He didn’t leave a trace,” the angel argued weakly, “and, well... oh, you know how hu - people, are, they’ll come up with anything.”

“No crop circles, though?” Crowley pressed, “No blinking lights in the sky? No strange creatures being seen by anyone - except Deep, I guess - nothing alien?”

Aziraphale wrinkled his nose at Crowley’s teasing. “No, nothing like that. Well, I’ve done all the hard work, I think it’s time for _your_  theory,” internally at this point, Anathema was rubbing her hands together in glee, “what do _you_  think happened?”

“I think,” the Definitely Not Obviously Responsible demon said, before pausing to tip more wine into his mouth, “I think that perhaps what happened is that Deep was getting in the way of someone’s quite excellent plan to craft a wonderfully cursed city, so perhaps that person might have tried to scare him off, give him a couple of warnings and the like, and maybe it wasn’t working so this person ramped up the scaring and it suddenly worked just a little _too_  well and Mr Deep flipped out and dropped everything to run off to Ireland, where good old St Patrick made sure there were no snakes, and certainly no men who could turn into snakes, and well hey if he’s leaving might as well help, so I - they - gave Deep a lift out of town by putting a nice convenient horse and cart outside his house and getting a boat at the nearest port the next morning that was Ireland bound.”

All of this was said in one breath.

“Or something. I don’t know,” Crowley said a few seconds after, to fill the silence of Aziraphale trying to wrap his head around what had just been said.

Eventually, the angel sighed. “Of course. Don’t know why I didn’t suspect... well,” he paused, tone shifting to forced cheer on that last word, “this has been Unsolved: True Crime, that’s all we have time for, good bye!”

And then the video ended, youtube automatically skipping directly to the next in the series, which Anathema quickly paused.

As an American who’d only spent time in Tadfield, really, while being in England, Anathema had previously not really heard of Manchester.

“Newt?” she yelled to the house at large. A few moments later she heard footsteps, then her boyfriend appeared at the door.

“Yes?”

“Have you ever been to Manchester?” she asked.

“Uh, yeah, once,” Newt confirmed. “Why?”

“I just found out that Crowley created it.”

Newt paused for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah, sounds about right, honestly.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Good Omens book: Crowley made Manchester  
> Literally everyone who lives in Manchester: ... yeah sounds about right
> 
> So yeah that’s my theory on how Crowley made Manchester happen: a little temptation and a little... warning people off.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one’s a bit shorter than usual, but here’s the Manchester episode QnA.  
> Thanks for all the comments on the last chapter! Also, this fic has hit 1000 views now which is amazing! So thanks to everyone whos been reading, and enjoy this chapter!

After Anathema had told Newt about Crowley and Manchester, she’d had to restart the video to show it to him.

“Let’s see what the QnA is like for this one,” Newt suggested. He made to click on the video, but remembered himself in time and let Anathema click it instead.

Immediately, Aziraphale’s customary greeting sounded (“Hello, and welcome to our Unsolved: True Crime Question and Answer episode!”) and the two were treated to the sight of Aziraphale and Crowley sat in Crowley’s flat, or at least they assumed that’s what the stark, empty grey room was.

“Yeah,” Crowley said, “We got a whole bunch of questions on the last episode so we thought we’d just make a video answering them all.”

“Alright, first question: ‘honestly if you told me Mancs was an evil alien experiment to cause the Earth suffering, I’d believe you’, which comes from Twitter.” Aziraphale read out from Crowley’s phone.

Crowley grinned. “I’m flattered, truly.”

Aziraphale huffed. “Ruined a perfectly good town is what you did. The next question is quite pertinent, actually: ‘Crowley, why do you like Manchester?’”

“Why would I _not_  love Manchester?” Crowley countered. “The energy of that place - better than the M25, honestly, and some truly awful public transport to boot. Got a pinch of that classic football hooliganism there, too, what with the City versus United divide.” He sighed, looking off into the distance happily. “Just wonderful.”

“Hmm, quite,” Aziraphale didn’t look particularly convinced. “How about another question? ‘I wonder who the sharply dressed man was? I bet he’s part of it.’”

“Yeah,” Crowley said, slightly shifty, “I think you might be onto something there.” He adjusted his sunglasses, pushing them further up his nose. “Maybe he’s part of a super secret mill-making organisation, or something.”

“Like... a mill-Illuminati?” Aziraphale asked.

“Yeah, Milluminati.”

Aziraphale groaned at the quality of the pun. “I set that one up for you, didn’t I?”

Crowley simply grinned. “Or maybe this guy is one of the _aliens_ ,” he suggested, waggling his fingers mysteriously as he said ‘aliens’.

“I thought you said that idea was stupid,” Aziraphale said flatly.

“... Whatever,” Crowley, ever with the snappy comebacks, countered. “Another question?”

“Yes. Hmm. This one isn’t much to do with the episode, really. And it’s not much of a question... Here: ‘Crowley’s fave place is the bookshop? #relationshipgoals’”

Crowley blushed. “It’s a good bookshop!” he defended. “And it’s always warm, and...”

“And what?” Aziraphale prompted.

“... And you’re always there.”

Aziraphale smiled, also beginning to blush slightly. “I suppose we really are, as they say... ‘relationship goals’.”

“Okay, okay,” Crowley, clearly finished with being sentimental, made to grab his phone back from Aziraphale. The angel let him have it easily enough. “Let’s do one last question. How about... ‘You two sound like you’re from London. Which do you prefer: there or Manchester?’

“Well, I think we all ready know which I prefer. What about you, angel?”

“Definitely London,” Aziraphale said, face scrunching up, “I’ve been to your Manchester, terrible place. Not very civilised at all. Too many bars, not enough tea shops. And I went into that pastry shop, the one you like...”

“Greggs?”

“Yes, Greggs. And I got insulted! Called me a Southern pansy!”

“Be fair, angel, that’s not the first time you’ve been accused of it. Although, come to think of it... city full of Shadwells, huh?”

“Hmm. I’d say the only good point was when I met all those lovely people down by the canal. Apart from that, you wouldn’t catch me up there again.”

“... Fair enough,” Crowley conceded. “Well, I think that’s enough for today. See you next time, I guess.”

The video ended there, and Anathema paused it before the autoplay (another of Crowley’s unappreciated greats - the other demons just didn’t see the pure rage its creation had allowed to be sparked in school pupils across the globe) could get any ideas.

“Is it really so bad?” Anathema said. “Manchester, I mean?”

Newt shrugged. “I’d say... not _everyone_  is a Shadwell type, but there’s certainly more than necessary. And that bit about the public transport... tried to get the bus just down the one road and it cost me almost a fiver. No air conditioning on there either, it was kind of gross.”

“We should visit,” Anathema decided.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The ‘people by the canal’ that Aziraphale talks about is a reference to Canal Street which is where Manchester's Gay Village is, because I subscribe to the headcanon that Aziraphale has regular interactions with the LGBT+ community.  
> Also my answer to the Mancs vs London debate is definitely in agreement in Crowley; Manchester all the way


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another deviation from the usual Unsolved episode format this chapter. Also, any resemblance of the two OCs in this chapter to a certain Supernatural duo is because I couldn’t think of any other names.  
> Thanks for all the comments (I’ve been trying to respond to them, idk do y’all prefer responses or not?), and enjoy the chapter!

Two men stood in a dark basement, each of them with their hands on their hips as they gazed, satisfied, at a job well done.

The job in question happened to be a quite intricate set of symbols and latin phrases and the like, all arranged in a circle. Hence, the basement: if you were going to try summoning a supernatural entity, there was a certain aesthetic standard you needed to adhere to.

“Right, Sam,” the shorter of the two said, checking that the camera they had was focused properly on the circle, and that the candles they had spread around the room (a fire hazard to be sure, but there was no compromising on the aesthetic) provided enough light to just about see what was going on, “ready to summon a demon?”

———

For the first time in several weeks, Crowley had managed to go until midday before seeing Aziraphale. The reason for this was mostly that he’d slept for longer than had become usual in this time, although nothing like his several decade long naps of the past. So, he was now on his way to the bookshop, after having rang ahead (Aziraphale had left him a voicemail message, asking where he was; Crowley was quite proud that the angel was getting the hang of voicemail =/= Crowley speaking to him live) to explain his lie-in and make a plan for where to eat lunch. Apparently, Aziraphale had heard of a place on the other side of London that sounded quite nice.

Screeching to a halt so sudden it would break a lesser man’s neck, Crowley parked quite illegally opposite the bookshop, stepped out of the Bentley, slammed the door behind him, and then nearly fell over as he found himself suddenly no longer outside. Instead, he was standing in the middle of a dimly lit basement, surrounded by a glowing circle, and being stared at by two men.

“Are you kidding me?” Crowley said, supremely unimpressed, “a summoning? Just as I’m about to meet up with angel?”

The two men, each looking to be in their mid thirties (old enough to know better, the hypocritical part of Crowley which didn’t acknowledge that he himself was over 6000 years old and still regularly lacked the most basic common sense), stared at the demon. Neither looked as if they had actually expected their summoning circle to really work. So, Crowley realised, he was dealing with amateurs here.

“You’re lucky I’d already parked,” Crowley continued before either of the humans could have any grand ideas about getting a word in edgeways, “I was going 90 miles an hour, the sudden removal of me from the Bentley would’ve probably caused some... damage to the car.”

While Crowley was busy complaining, the first-time summoners had been (post recovery from the shock of success) making sure that the camera was definitely rolling, and their mic was on, and also sharing glances to check that they definitely were both seeing this, and it wasn’t just a shared hallucination. Once all this was confirmed, the shorter man spoke: “Oh, foul demon -“

Before he could get any further, Crowley snorted. “Foul demon?” he mocked, “Not a very nice way to start a conversation. Also, really makes me think you weren’t listening to me just then. I may be, as you put it, a ‘foul demon’, but I’m not eternally stuck in the seventeenth century.”

“Err... what do we call you then?” the taller man asked.

“Anthony,” Crowley said with a winning smile. “I’d go in for a handshake, but your circle looks to be the containing kind.” Then, after a few seconds in which neither of the two humans spoke, he prompted: “Well? Your names?”

“Umm, I’m Sam,” the taller said, earning him a glare from his co-summoner, “and that’s Dean.”

“Don’t tell him that!” Dean snapped, “What about all that stuff you hear about names having power?”

Underneath his sunglasses, Crowley rolled his eyes. Realising that this rather ruined the effect, he removed the glasses (wasn’t like they were any use hiding his being a demon) and gave the eye roll another go, putting some real effort into it. “Don’t need your names to... I don’t know, turn you into ducks, I guess. Names just means we can all be civil about this.”

At this point, Dean remembered the reason why he’d gone to the trouble of this whole summoning ritual business in the first place, and turned to the camera. “Well, as you can see, viewers, we’ve got ourselves a demon!”

“Oh, this is for a TV show, is it?” Crowley asked, giving the camera a little wave. “I’d delete all your footage, but honestly I’d be surprised if even a single crackpot theorist believes you, let alone your average audience member.”

“Youtube, actually,” Sam corrected. “We’re the most popular supernatural-based channel on there. Ghost hunting, finding cursed items, trapping demons, the works.”

“Most popular?” Crowley repeated, “We’ll see about that; me and Aziraphale - oh! Aziraphale!”

With that, the demon reached into his pocket and retrieved his phone, dialling Aziraphale’s number. Within a few seconds, the angel picked up, and Crowley put him on speaker.

“Crowley? I was about to go looking for you! I thought you said you’d be here in a few minutes!”

“Yeah, last minute change of plans,” Crowley said, “got summoned by some two-bit youtuber guys,” said two-bit youtubers made simultaneous noises of affront, which Crowley dismissed with a wave in their direction, “I’m trapped in the circle.” Then, he tapped. a few buttons on his phone. “I’ve sent you my location,” he said, “looks like I’m still in London. Come get me?”

“Oh, yes, that’s near the restaurant I was talking about! Well, I’ll be there lickety split!”

The call ended, leaving Crowley to mouth ‘lickety split’ at his phone in confusion. After a moment he shrugged, pocketed the phone again, and turned back to the two humans.

“Who’d you just call?” Dean asked, not quite masking the fear in his voice.

“Oh, that was angel,” Crowley said, “He should be here in, what, ten minutes? Depends if he thinks it’s urgent enough to come running. Could be longer.”

Internally, Crowley was pretty pleased right now that he’d managed to convince Aziraphale to get a smart phone. He’d been picturing its usefulness to come more in the form of ‘now I have the ability to send memes to angel’ rather than ‘now angel can come save me from dumb summoners’, but still.

Sam and Dean, internally, were less than pleased. Sure, the demon summoning had clearly been a success, and they could probably edit the footage to make the demon seem a little more... menacing, but now he’d called for backup, and neither man felt particularly ready to face off against who could only be another demon (a strange nickname for one, though), one who wasn’t safely contained in a circle.

Sam glanced at Dean. Dean glanced at Sam. Luckily for them, they knew each other well enough to be correct in their assumptions that they had just communicated ‘let’s split’ via their glances.

“Well,” Sam said, as Dean grabbed the recording equipment and shoved it hastily into their bag, “nice meeting you, think we’re just going to... leave now.”

Without further fanfare, the two men rushed off, leaving Crowley alone, trapped in the dim basement for Someone knew how long.

“Hope Aziraphale doesn’t take too long...” Crowley said to himself, sitting crosslegged in the centre of the circle. He got out his phone again. “I knew inventing those mindless, time-killing apps would be good for something.”

———

As luck would have it, Aziraphale had indeed overestimated the severity of the situation, so fifteen minutes later the extremely out of breath angel burst into the room, where he found Crowley sprawled out on the floor in starfish position, fingers only just not hitting the invisible boundary that was trapping him inside.

“Where are the summoners?” Aziraphale asked once he’d gotten his breath back, looking around as if expecting a threat to jump out from one of the shadowy corners of the small room.

“Chickened out once they heard you were coming,” Crowley explained, pushing himself into a sitting position. “Took you long enough,” he complained lightly, standing up fully as Aziraphale inspected the circle, “tossed my phone out of the circle a few minutes ago after I lost again in that one stupid level - it’s been torture, I tell y-“

Crowley cut off as he found himself suddenly engulfed in a hug from Aziraphale.

“I was worried,” Aziraphale’s muffled voice came from around Crowley’s shoulder, “that they would have actually tortured you.”

Crowley softened, returning the embrace fully for a moment before holding the angel at arms length. “I’m fine, see?” He gestured at himself as well as he could with his hands still attached to Aziraphale’s shoulders, “They weren’t going to do anything. Honestly I don’t think they even expected the circle to work.”

Aziraphale gave Crowley another once over before nodding to himself, stepping away from the demon, and giving the lapels of his jacket a quick tug, straightening an invisible crease.

“Yes, quite. Well, onto lunch?”

———

Crowley and Aziraphale - Aziraphale especially - would’ve been quite pleased never to hear of the two demon summoning youtubers again, but unfortunately they only managed about a week before being reminded of their existence.

The trouble came, as it often did, upon their regularly scheduled visit to Tadfield, during which Newt was fascinated to hear about their collaboration with popular youtubers Sam and Dean.

“Collaboration?” Aziraphale had spent the past week pointedly _not_ thinking about the whole incident, on account of not liking the thoughts of what might have happened, had the two summoners been the slightest bit competent, and as such had forgotten that Sam and Dean were youtubers.

“Yeah, you know, that video. You weren’t in it,” Newt gestured with his phone to Aziraphale, then started an attempt to find said video, “but Crowley mentions you, I thought you knew?”

Crowley, who very much _did_  remember the events of last week, scowled. “That wasn’t a collaboration, that was a legitimate summoning and it was a right pain in the arse I’ll tell you that.”

“Ah,” Aziraphale said with a tone of dawning realisation, “Them. Yes.”

“Aha!” Newt, who hadn’t really been listening to the last few seconds of conversation, held out his phone to the two supernatural entities in triumph. “Thought it’d be in my recommended, see?”

With some degree of trepidation, Aziraphale took the phone. The video Newt was pointing at had a thumbnail of the circle Crowley had been trapped in, with the purple smiling demon emoji and the shocked and appalled emoji put in the corners. After a quick glance at the title (Nearly Got Killed By Demons - NOT Clickbait!!!), Aziraphale opened up the video.

Immediately he was greeted by the image of two men, sat on a sofa in a quite normal looking living room that Aziraphale didn’t recognise.

“Hey guys!” the taller of the two said, “we’ve got a really exciting episode for you today.” He held up a notepad, upon which were various scribbled bits of notes, the most prominent of which was the circle design they had chalked onto the basement floor. “I’ve been doing a whole bunch of research, so today we’re finally going to do what a whole bunch if you have requested... that’s right, we’re gonna summon a demon!”

“You didn’t even introduce us to any new viewers,” the shorter said with a fond-looking eye roll, “I’m Dean,” he pointed to himself, “and this is Sam.”

“Right,” Sam said impatiently, “and right now we’re gonna go to the basement we’ve hired out for our ritual!”

The screen cut to a scene both Aziraphale and Crowley knew well. The circle wasn’t quite drawn out fully, but all the candles were lit and they were in the basement.

“Dean’s drawing it out,” Sam explained from behind the camera, zooming in on his chalk-holding companion, “‘cause he’s got the better artistic talent.” The camera turned round to give a full selfie-view of Sam. “See you when we get our demon!”

There was another cut, and now both Sam and Dean were visible, Dean with his back to the camera doing some sort of chant, and Sam facing the camera, giving it a thumbs up. As the shorter man continued to speak, the circle started to glow, brighter and brighter until the camera could barely make out anything other than the light. Just as the entire screen was about to become white, the light dimmed, Dean stopped speaking, and when the camera focused again it was on Crowley, stood in the middle of the circle and looking somewhat confused.

Thus followed an edited version of Crowley’s conversation with the two men, mostly removing any mocking Crowley had done of them, and completely removing Aziraphale’s voice on the phone call. Apparently lickety split didn’t make for a scary enough ‘demon’.

Crowley had expected the video to end with Sam and Dean hurriedly packing away their equipment and leaving, but instead once the camera turned off in the basement, the video returned to the living room from before.

“So there you have it!” Sam said, looking like he’d ran the whole way to the room and immediately started recording, “Our encounter with a demon. I can’t believe he called for backup - imagine if that ‘angel’ he called for had arrived while we were still there!”

“You should edit that circle,” Dean said, “if we ever try this again I don’t want to meet that Anthony again.”

“So,” Newt said after the video came to a close, “that wasn’t a collab? People can like, actually summon you?”

“You can summon any demon with the right circle,” Crowley said, taking the phone from Aziraphale’s hands to look over the comments on the video. “They should summon Hastur next, and leave _him_ in that basement.” He scrolled a bit more, then laughed, “Oh, I told them, everyone thinks its a fake!”

Indeed, the comments on the video were full of people either congratulating the amazing special effects, pointing out where it was ‘totally obvious’ that it was edited, or people aware of both their and Aziraphale and Crowley’s channels gushing over the perceived collaboration.

“Can I have my phone...” Newt sighed as Crowley passed the phone back to Aziraphale, who started scrolling back up the comments, “... back.”

“Ooh, look at this,” Aziraphale said, pointing to another video, “they’re doing a Live Stream!” he continued, in a tone indicating both his intrigue and the fact that he had no clue what a livestream actually was.

“What are they up to now?” Crowley asked, bringing up the video.

Sam and Dean were, as the livestream revealed, back in the basement with a new, slightly altered circle.

“Since last time, no one believed we actually got a demon,” Dean said, glaring at the camera, “we’re going live this time. Sam altered the circle a bit so we won’t get anyone who looks like some other youtuber, hopefully.” Then, he started to chant.

Aziraphale grabbed Crowley’s arm.

“Relax, angel; they said they’d change the circle.” Crowley said, making no move to remove Aziraphale’s grip.

Again, after a good minute of Dean’s chant, the circle started to glow, and Aziraphale’s grip tightened. A few seconds later, it became clear that whoever was being summoned, it wasn’t Crowley, and the angel relaxed.

There was still nothing but light visible on screen, but Dean’s “What the fuck,” was clearly audible.

The reason for Dean’s confusion was revealed a moment later, when the light died down to reveal a rather more crowded circle than anyone had expected. Stacked uncomfortably on top of each other, like a demonic game of tetris, were the Erics.

At this point, quite understandably, the livestream derailed. There was a lot of muffled shouts from several of the Erics, most of whom were unable to see for having their faces mashed into their fellow demons. Only one, who had their face pushed into the invisible barrier of the circle, instead, could actually see Sam and Dean; they tried to wave at the pair, but found their arm stuck. The two demon summoners themselves had taken a big step back from the circle, and didn’t seem sure what to do next.

“Shit,” Crowley said eloquently.

“Isn’t that the demon from your park video?” Newt asked. “But... a lot of them?”

“Yes,” Crowley said, “and they don’t look particularly comfortable there... and I’m going to have to go save them, aren’t I?”

“How are we going to get over there?” Aziraphale asked.

“Ah, well, actually,” Crowley said, slightly sheepish, “When I threw my phone across the room when I was trapped in that circle, I, ah, forgot to pick it back up again.”

“Oh!” Aziraphale smiled. “Well, that’s some good luck.”

“Hmm, yeah, absolutely ineffable,” Crowley responded, gesturing to Aziraphale’s pocket. The angel got out his own mobile, and called Crowley.

“We’ll be back in a bit,” Aziraphale told Newt as, on the livestream, Sam noticed the phone ringing in the corner and picked it up. “Don’t end the call.”

On screen, Sam, curious, accepted the call. Before he could even hold the phone up to his ear, both Crowley and Aziraphale, who had moments before been sat on a sofa in Newt and Anathema’s house, reformed - having spent a brief moment moving through the telephone network - in the basement in front of Sam.

In an impressive display of restraint and composure, Sam managed to only yelp as he was faced with two fully grown men popping out of a random phone, rather than full on screaming. Hearing his friend’s distress, Dean rushed round the column of Erics.

“You!” he shouted, pointing at Crowley, “and your demon friend!”

“Not a demon,” Aziraphale started to correct. Crowley shot him a look, and he abandoned the attempt in order to start undoing the circle.

“How did you get here?” Dean demanded.

“Through the phone,” Crowley answered dismissively. He walked round the circle, giving the camera a wink and fingerguns as he passed it, until he found an Eric that could actually see him. “Here to rescue you,” he told them, “it’ll just be a second.”

Sam and Dean shared a glance quite similar to the one they’d shared last week. Coming to the same conclusion, the two marched round to the camera.

“See that?” Dean said, pointing to the stack of Erics, “If you don’t believe us now then I don’t know what’ll convince you.”

Then he turned off the camera, Sam grabbed the laptop they’d been streaming from, and the two humans hightailed it out of there. Not a moment too soon, either, for just as the door closed behind them, Aziraphale managed to deactivate the circle, and the suddenly no longer confined Erics cascaded out onto the floor.

Chaos descended for a minute as all the Erics scrambled to stand up in the cramped space.

Once everyone was stood properly, Crowley addressed the room: “I’d better not hear a single ‘thanks’ from any one of you. Now get back to Hell.”

One by one, the Erics started descending into the ground, each thanking Aziraphale, who _would_  accept thanks, before they went. As the last Eric disappeared, Crowley picked up his phone, which had miraculously survived being trampled on by several Erics, and checked that the call was still going.

“On our way back now,” was the only warning Crowley bothered to give Newt before both he and Aziraphale made the return trip to Tadfield.

“Well,” Aziraphale said after they’d settled back down, now with topped up cups of tea and a plate of biscuits, “I’m glad that’s done with.”

“Aren’t you going to have to go back for Crowley’s phone?” Newt asked.

Silence spread out across the room, broken rather loudly by Crowley

“For _fuck’s_  sake.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapters might start coming a little slower now cause I’ve gotta come up with more ideas for episodes, but I’m not giving up on the fic just yet.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m back with another episode! I don’t think there’s really much to say here, so thanks for the comments and enjoy the chapter!

After the whole summoning debacle, Crowley and Aziraphale took a break from youtube while they waited for the internet to calm down with all of their strange theories about the events of that week. Crowley was amused at the mental acrobatics involved in the collective human denial that he was a demon. Instead, it was popularly theorised that he had a secret twin, who had been _possessed_  by a demon. The most popular theory was still of course that it was all smoke and mirrors, though.

Eventually, the hype started to die down, and in typical fashion everyone forgot what they’d all been so excited about in the first place, and moved onto the latest hot topic (which in Crowley’s opinion could be anything it wanted, so long as it didn’t involve himself or Aziraphale).

During this lull, on one of Crowley and Aziraphale’s fortnightly Tadfield visits, Crowley was approached by Newt while Anathema taught Aziraphale the basics of baking (it was simply wrong, the witch had said, that a being so enamoured of food could go 6000 years without ever learning how to cook it for himself).

“Do you know when you’re gonna do your next episode?” the would-be computer technician asked, distracting Crowley from his very important task of staring at Aziraphale as he mixed the flour into his cake mix a tad overzealously, causing his clothes to get covered in the powder.

“Er, no.” Crowley said, distracted, as the angel turned pleading eyes to him. Before continuing the train of thought, he miracled the flour off Aziraphale’s jacket. “Take it off if you don’t want it dirty,” he advised as Aziraphale gave him a delighted smile. Then he turned back to Newt. “Not got any ideas for another episode yet, anyway.”

“Oh!” Newt perked up, “Well, that’s why I brought it up; I was looking through Shadwell’s newspaper collection, just for something to do, and I found something I thought you might be able to do a video on.”

Crowley turned back to Aziraphale, who had indeed removed his jacket, miracled himself up a nice tartan apron, and was now stirring his mix a lot more carefully than before. “They look pretty busy,” he said, “come on, show it me before angel finds another thing for me to run stain-removal on.”

And so, by the time Aziraphale and Anathema’s joint efforts had produced a lovely Victoria sponge, and the Them had arrived to sample it, Crowley had gathered enough information from Newt for a proper episode.

“We could film it here,” Aziraphale suggested upon being informed of this, “Unless it requires a visit in person?”

“Nah, nothing special about the town. It’s just an accusation of witchcraft that looks a bit more likely than most of the Witchfinder Army’s usual fare.” Crowley replied, taking a sip of Anathema’s homemade lemonade. His lips pursed slightly at the sour taste, soon remedied by a quick, surreptitious miracle.

The Them were having no such issues with a lack of sugar, having all demolished their slices of cake.

“You’re filming an episode? Can we be in it?” Adam asked.

“That’d be wicked,” Brian added, wiping his face with a sleeve and only managing to get jam all over both his jumper and his face.

Aziraphale pulled a face. “Well,” he said hesitantly.

“You’d have to get permission from your parents first,” Crowley said, willing to save Aziraphale from dampening the Them’s collective mood, “and I don’t think they’d be happy about you being all over youtube.”

Predictably, the Them all deflated at the shutdown.

“You could watch,” Aziraphale offered, caving almost instantly to Adam’s sad face (it amused Crowley more than he’d admit, to see the angel get a taste of his own medicine), “but you’d have to be quiet.”

Suitably appeased, the Them waited with all the patience four excitable eleven year olds could muster (so, they were bouncing in their seats and staring at Aziraphale as he slowly finished his slice), until everyone was ready to go. Crowley grabbed the camera, and the eight (Newt as cameraman and Anathema as another interested party member) set off to the spot they’d used previously for recording.

Once everyone was situated, either at the camera, at the re-miracled bench under the tree, or on the newly miracled up picnic blanket behind the camera, the recording began.

“Hello, and welcome to another episode of Unsolved...” Aziraphale glanced over at Crowley, lost.

“I think this one counts as a True Crime? I mean, witchcraft _was_  a crime back then, right?”

“Unsolved True Crime, then.”

“Special treat today,” Crowley announced. “It was me who did the research this time, so I’m gonna be explaining things and Aziraphale’s job is to just sit there and look pretty, I guess.”

“So, what’s the case for today, then?” Aziraphale asked.

“Today’s case took place in a village much like this one, near London, called Lavenham. The year was 1788, and witch hunts had been dying out in England for a while.

“But in Lavenham, the hunt was about to restart. You see, in late August of that year, there was a string of... strange circumstances.” Crowley picked up a newspaper clipping from beside him on the bench. He gestured to an article. “See here, it says that all the crops in the fields grew overnight!”

Aziraphale coughed. “Did they now?” he said, voice strained. “How... surprising.”

“The word I’d’ve used is suspicious, but yeah.” Crowley said. “Especially ‘cause some people swore they’d never even planted crops in the first place.”

“Very odd,” Aziraphale agreed. “What, uh, what else is going on then?”

“I’m glad you asked!” Crowley pulled out a second paper, “You see, there had been an outbreak of some illness - nobody at the time was actually sure what, it’s just listed as plague outbreak - amongst the children of the village, but, in the same week as the crops suddenly growing, all of them were mysteriously cured.”

“ _Children_ , though,” Aziraphale said, mostly to himself, “surely they wouldn’t punish someone for healing the children.”

Crowley gave the angel a sympathetic look. “You’d think,” he said, “but no. Several women in the village were accused of witchcraft, and one even got tried for it. And here’s the best bit.

“She was tried by ducking, so they set up the stool, dunked her in the water, held her under for a few minutes... and when they pulled the stool back out, she’d vanished.”

From behind the camera, the Them, who had so far done a quite valiant job of keeping quiet, couldn’t contain their gasps of surprise.

Aziraphale, meanwhile, gave a pantomime of a gasp a split second later than the Them’s reaction. _“Really?”_  he said. “Vanished, you say?”

“Yeah, just clean disappeared,” Crowley, wrapped up in excitement as he was, hadn’t noticed how Aziraphale was acting somewhat... off. “Alright, so; onto the theories!

“Theory one: the obvious choice, witches. Everyone in the town seemed to think so, and the woman disappearing lends a lot of credence to the idea. Plus, the ‘acts of witchcraft’ stopped as soon as she left.”

“So, what’s wrong with that one?” Aziraphale asked, voice admirably normal.

“Guess she had a normal amount of nipples,” Crowley shrugged, earning a laugh from Newt and scandalised gasps from the Them at the concept of an adult saying such a word in their presence. “Nah, I don’t know. Guess people finally decided witches didn’t exist.” The Them, at this, shared a knowing glance with Anathema. “Anyway, witches is a quite sensible conclusion compared to the next theory.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, some people think Aliens Did It,” Crowley said, eyes rolling behind the sunglasses. “The proof? Well, who needs proof when your theory is aliens did it? Absolutely no crop circles, no strange lights in the sky, not even that mysterious anachronous police box that people keep saying is proof of alien involvement.”

“Not even a flying saucer?” Pepper piped up, sounding appalled at the concept. “That’s not proper aliens, then.”

“No, not even a saucer,” Crowley said. He paused a bit, so he could edit the background chatter out better later, then continued: “So, that’s our crackpot theories out of the way. Time for a more sensible one.

“There are mentions of a kind stranger who was in town at about the same time as the strange occurrences.”

“Was there?” Aziraphale’s voice came at a much higher pitch than usual.

“Yeah,” Crowley confirmed. Sat on the picnic blanket, Anathema slapped a palm against her face. “If you ask me, I’d say _he’s_  the one who did any magic that might have occurred.” Aziraphale was too busy panicking about that statement to respond, so Crowley continued: “Honestly though, it’s probably just that the man was a doctor or something, and the whole crops thing was just... made up, I guess.”

Aziraphale audibly sighed with relief. “Yes, I’m sure that’s it.”

“That’s the theory you’re backing?” Crowley arched an eyebrow and sent a grin in the angel’s direction. “I’d’ve thought you’d go in for the alien theory.”

“Oh, no, there’s nothing at all supernatural happening here, it’s all just completely normal.”

Finally, the penny dropped. Crowley’s grin widened and he lowered his sunglasses to better stare at the angel with raised eyebrows. “Angel?”

“Yes?” Aziraphale, well aware that Crowley had finally seen the truth but still in denial, said in as innocent a tone as he could muster. For an angel, it wasn’t very impressive.

“ _You_  did this, didn’t you?”

Aziraphale managed to keep a straight face for a few seconds, before eventually: “Alright, yes!” he admitted, “that ‘kind stranger’ was me,” he gave accompanying finger quotes as he spoke, “I just couldn’t let the children die! And last year’s harvest hadn’t been great, and with being ill, everyone needed to keep their strength up, and I couldn’t let that poor woman die because of my miracles... It’s what I’d got that warning for, you know - 1793, with those delicious crepes. Frivolous miracles. Nothing frivolous about it!”

  
Crowley was still grinning as if Satan himself had finally given him that ‘wahoo’ for his job on the M25. “Only you, angel,” he said fondly.

Aziraphale opened his mouth, but didn’t manage to make any intelligible noises. He closed it again, then took a deep, calming breath, before managing: “Okay, that’s all we have time for this episode.”

Crowley nodded, taking pity. “Ciao,” he said, giving the camera a lazy salute.

The camera shut off, and the Them stood up from their place on the picnic blanket. Once everyone was off it, the blanket vanished, as did the bench once Crowley and Aziraphale were stood.

“I can’t believe you’re a witch, Aziraphale!” Adam said excitedly, jumping around the angel as he tried to put the camera away. “Don’t worry, we broke up the English Inquisition, but you can still get tortured into confessing I guess, if you want.”

“‘Torturing’ here means pushing on a tire swing,” Anathema explained, before Crowley, who had stiffened at the mention of Inquisitions, could do anything he’d regret.

“Spanish bloody Inquisition,” the demon muttered to himself darkly, “stupid humans and their stupid...” he continued his tirade as he stomped off in the direction of the Bentley.

“Oh dear,” Aziraphale said, “I’m afraid I’ll have to decline your offer this time,” he told Adam politely, “I must see to Crowley...”

As the pair walked off, Anathema heard Aziraphale ask Crowley, “could I tempt you to drinks at mine tonight?”, followed by a barely audible laugh from the demon, so she decided to leave the two to it and see to the mildly disappointed Them instead.

“You know,” she leant down to the four, tone conspiratorial, “I might just be a witch. I guess you’d have to torture me to find out, huh?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Figured it was about time for Aziraphale to be behind the episode, so here’s my headcanon for how he got that miracles reprimand in the show.  
> I feel as though heaven in the show would be like, ‘yeah its your job to help people but only the people We say you should help’.  
> Also Lavenham is the first nice village name I got when searching ‘villages near London’ so it’s a real place but I know nothing about it, so who knows if there were ever witches there?


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is technically a QnA episode, but really its like 80% Aziraphale and Crowley out on a date  
> Thanks for all the comments on the last chapter, and enjoy this one!

Aziraphale looked out of the window of the Bentley, hoping to get a glimpse of a road sign for long enough to actually read it. “Where are we going?”

“I told you already angel, it’s a secret!”

Crowley _had_  told Aziraphale that today’s trip location was a secret. However, that had been almost three hours ago, even with Crowley going 50 over the speed limit, so by now the angel was starting to get a bit impatient.

Crowley yanked the steering wheel to the left, drifting over to the outer lane without so much as a thought towards using his indicator, and slowed down to a comparatively sedate 90 miles per hour as he pulled off the motorway. During this manoeuvre, Aziraphale finally managed to read a sign.

“Oh!” the angel gasped, delighted, “Cornwall!”

Already a few miles behind them, the sign in question started trembling, ever so slightly, as Crowley’s ire reached it. “Stupid sign,” the demon grumbled, “ruining the surprise.”

“Well, it’s a lovely surprise,” Aziraphale beamed, “It’s been too long since we last went to Cornwall.”

Crowley hummed his agreement, still slightly annoyed that the surprise had been spoiled, but glad that Aziraphale was excited. The two sat in companionable silence - save for occasionally singing along to the Best of Queen the Bentley was blasting for them, of course - until they reached their destination.

It was a sunny day (which, along with the prospect of inciting more sc-own sc-on debating, was why Crowley had decided on the trip), so many people had had the same idea as Crowley, and now, as it approached midday, parking was Hell. Luckily, Crowley was a demon, so he just abandoned the car as close to the beach as he could get it.

“Spot of lunch?” Aziraphale suggested as the two stepped out into the sun. Realising that he had indeed stepped out into The Sun, a rarity even in the Summer, Aziraphale miracled himself up a lovely straw sunhat, with a baby blue bow, and placed it upon his head. “I was thinking pasties.”

Crowley rolled his eyes at the fashion choice, but also presented Aziraphale with a pair of round sunglasses in a matching blue, with tinted pink lenses. “Sure,” he said as the angel grinned at his new eyewear. He turned towards the beach, where the tide was out enough that a cobblestone path leading to a large island just off the coast could be seen. “On the mount or off?”

Aziraphale studied the island - St Michael’s Mount - thoughtfully. “Let’s buy them over here and walk over after,” he decided.

Fifteen minutes later (Crowley considered it his demonic duty to push in front of every queue he came across) saw the angel and the demon sat on the beach, watching the gentle waves and taking bites of Cornish pasties. Aziraphale had acquiesced and not given himself a knife and fork (“The ridge was specifically designed for you to hold it, angel! Do it right for G- for Satan’s sake!”), but was putting in the effort to make sure not a single crumb fell into his lap as he ate. Crowley had no such reservations, and by halfway through his pasty had more bits of it in his lap than bits that he’d eaten.

When Crowley finished eating, Aziraphale was still barely halfway through his own food, so the demon brushed the crumbs from his lap and into his hand, and set about making some mischief.

“Must you, Crowley?” Aziraphale asked, as the demon in question used his leftovers to entice a nearby seagull.

Crowley ignored him. “Hey,” he greeted the seagull, “you know, there’s a guy over there who’s just buying an ice cream, and he looks like the type to let it go unguarded.”

The seagull squawked at him, nodded in as solemn manner as a bird could, and flew off to circle their new target. Aziraphale winced as, true to Crowley’s predictions, barely thirty seconds after walking away with his purchase, the seagull had dive-bombed the poor beachgoer, leaving him with an ice cream-less cone, and a shocked expression on his slightly sunburnt face.

Crowley mimed wiping a tear of laughter from his eye. Aziraphale gave him an unimpressed look as he took another bite of pasty.

“What? He’ll have learnt for next time, now. If anything I was doing him a favour.” Crowley defended. The effect was immediately ruined as he started cajoling another seagull over to him.

Three more ice creams had fallen victim to Crowley’s demonic scheming by the time Aziraphale finished off his pasty. He gave a contented sigh, then the two supernatural entities stood in unison, miraculously not getting any sand stuck to their clothes, and set off down the path to the island.

Only a few steps away from actually being on St Micheal’s Mount, Crowley stopped.

“Wait,” he said, “wasn’t this place a monastery? Is it consecrated ground?”

“I don’t think so,” Aziraphale answered, “It hasn’t been used religiously for centuries...”

Crowley shuffled forwards to the edge of the path, and placed a tentative foot down onto the actual island. Immediately, he pulled his foot back up, and turned to Aziraphale with a frown. “Consecrated,” he confirmed.

Aziraphale deflated. “Oh,” he said. “I’d been looking forwards to seeing how this place had changed over the centuries. I hear the castle at the top is rather interesting.”

“Well,” Crowley said, at length, “I _guess_  I could walk around it, if you want to look around...”

“Oh, no, you shouldn’t have to be uncomfortable just for me,” Aziraphale said. Then he stood for a moment, thinking. “Actually,” he said at last, brightening up, “I think I have an idea!”

And so, Aziraphale swept Crowley off his feet and carried him round the island, bridal style, for a brief tour of the castle and grounds. They had to switch to a piggyback arrangement on the way back down the steps to the castle, so Aziraphale could see where he was going, and they stayed that way until they were back on the path, still not hidden by the tides, where Aziraphale deposited Crowley back on the ground.

“We should find a beach with better waves,” Crowley decided, halfway along the path back to the mainland. “We can go surfing.”

Aziraphale didn’t look thrilled at the idea. “And a cream tea after?” he offered, tone compromising.

“Sure,” Crowley agreed. Once back in the Bentley, which had a parking fine and several angry notes attached to it for Crowley to burn away, he pulled put a map of the area and unfurled it, searching for a suitable location.

Aziraphale pointed to a town directly North of their current location. “St Ives!” he announced, as that was the name of the town, “I know there are a few lovely places to get cream teas there.”

Crowley shrugged agreement - there were several beaches there; surely one would have at least enough waves that a little demonically miracled up good wave wouldn’t be too out of place - and started the car.

Once they’d arrived (in record time after barelling down all the single file country lanes, narrowly avoiding other cars, and at one point a whole herd of cows), and parked up on another convenient street, Crowley used another quick miracle to change outfit. With a flick of his hand, he changed into a black wetsuit, with sea snake patterning, modelled off a suit he’d seen once online that advertised protection from sharks.

“You’re keeping the jacket?” Aziraphale, who had also changed, his own outfit now an early 1900s style bathing suit, with classic horizontal blue stripes, along with his sunhat. “Won’t it get wet?”

“It won’t,” Crowley said decisively, and who was the jacket to argue?

The two left the Bentley and headed for the nearest beach (Porth something, Crowley thought it was, though that could be any of the beaches given that they were _all_  called Porth something), which had suitably large waves for Crowley’s tastes. Once on the beach, Crowley got out a surfboard (also black, with red patterns), and Aziraphale miracled up a bright yellow scrunched up mass of flimsy plastic, and a foot pump.

“You could’ve just made it pre-inflated,” Crowley pointed out, as Aziraphale started pushing air into the side of what was starting to look a bit like a misshapen boat.

Aziraphale swapped feet, using his left leg to step on the pedal instead. “That ruins the fun of it, dear,” he said. Crowley rolled his eyes, leaning impatiently against his board, which he’d jammed down into the sand, as Aziraphale’s rubber duck shaped inflatable boat slowly became fully formed.

By the time the boat was sea worthy, Crowley was practically hopping from foot to foot in his impatience. Naturally, this was the moment that a young woman, dressed in a floral vintage swimming costume, decided to approach.

“Excuse me,” she said, as Crowley turned away and groaned loudly, “I just noticed your swimming costume, it’s really cool,” she said, gesturing to Aziraphale. Crowley hastily turned a laugh into a cough at the description. “where did you get it?”

Aziraphale stood for a moment, thinking. “I don’t remember where, exactly,” he said eventually. “Some shop in London in 1915.”

The woman gave an awkward laugh, then an even awkwarder exit to the conversation. “Well, I just wanted to say it was nice, so... see you!”

As soon as she started to walk back off down the beach, Crowley grabbed Aziraphale’s hand and started dragging him towards the sea. The angel let himself be walked along, making sure he was taking his duck boat with him.

Once at the water, Aziraphale placed the boat down at the first of the waves, and stepped in, sitting down cross-legged. Crowley grabbed the boat by the head of the duck and pulled it out until it was bobbing gently on the waves, and he was waist-deep in water. Then he miracled up a cord, and attached his surfboard to Aziraphale’s duck.

This arrangement should not have ended well. Luckily, and to the confusion of anyone seeing the pair in action, Crowley was capable of surfing on the relatively small waves, and also dragging Aziraphale happily along behind him in his rubber duck.

Eventually, Crowley tired of surfing, and made his way back to shore. Aziraphale hopped out of the boat, and both it and the surfboard disappeared. Once a suitable distance from the wet sand, the angel returned to his usual attire. Crowley, quite enjoying the beachy vibes he was giving off, simply dried off his wetsuit a bit.

It didn’t take long to find a cafe offering cream teas. The one they selected was a little busy, but just so happened to have a table for two available at the window, with a wonderful sea view. Crowley went off to make the order as Aziraphale sat down.

The demon came back soon enough, with a small flag with their order number printed on, which he placed on the table before sitting. He looked around the room with a calculating stare, then announced, much louder than necessary, to Aziraphale: “Wow, I can’t wait for these sc-ons.”

“Really, dear?” Aziraphale gave a resigned sigh as most people within hearing range winced. Crowley responded simply with a grin.

After a few minutes of conversation, into which Crowley diligently tried to work the word ‘scones’ at any opportunity, a waitress came over with a tray containing a pot of tea, their scones, and all the trimmings.

“I’ve been thinking,” Crowley said as he took up a scone, already cut perfectly in half, and held it up to spoon on a layer of cream. Aziraphale gave him a judging look as he poured out the tea, as did several other onlookers. “We’ve been getting quite a few questions, mostly about that whole summoning business but also about the witch hunt.”

“Ooh, yes!” Aziraphale, who was applying the jam first to his own scones, caught Crowley’s drift, “We could do an episode on the beach! That’s a lovely idea.”

Crowley nodded, and tried to spread jam over his scone. He frowned, finding himself impeded in this task because of his already present cream layer, and that frown morphed into a scowl as he noticed Aziraphale, who was easily adding cream on top of the jam, laughing gently at him. Eventually he gave up, using the aid of a quick demonic miracle to get the jam spread evenly, and took an enthusiastic bite.

Predictably, Crowley finished off his scones much faster than Aziraphale, so while the angel sat, daintily cutting neat squares of scone and unknowingly causing much more distress to everyone in the general vicinity than Crowley had managed, Crowley scoured through the internet in search of questions. He’d found a handful of the most asked ones by the time Aziraphale had managed to polish off the scones.

The two left the cafe, the sun by now just starting to set, and wandered around until they found a beach that was suitably empty, then positioned themselves on a miracled up picnic blanket (the same from their witch hunt video, in fact), before either realised that they’d need a camera to record footage.

At the realisation, Crowley snapped the camera into existence in front of them, perfectly positioned and ready to roll.

“Hello, and welcome to another Unsolved Q and A! Coming to you today from Cornwall!”

“Yep, we’re bringing you some beach vibes, and also the answers to some frankly weirdly frequently asked questions. For starters: ‘hey Crowley, why are you related to a demon?’”

“ _That’s_ what they think that video was?” Aziraphale asked, surprised, “they think that was... some kind of relative of yours?”

“Yup,” Crowley confirmed, popping the p. “And the answer is, of course, because I’m _not_  related to any demons.”

“Well, naturally,” Aziraphale agreed. “So, what’s the next question?”

“Another one about those other guys’ video, actually: ‘when are you two gonna do another collab with Sam and Dean?’”

“Never, if I have anything to say about it!” Aziraphale answered. “Honestly, summoning demons... it can be dangerous!”

Crowley scoffed. “They were never in any danger, angel. Unless they’d summoned anyone else, of course... but that sounds like a problem for them.”

“I meant dangerous for the demon, actually,” Aziraphale corrected, taking hold of Crowley’s hand. “If they’d had any holy water on them...”

“Yeah, yeah, I’d’ve just found a way out of there myself if there’d been _real_ danger.” Despite Crowley’s dismissive tone, he gave Aziraphale’s hand a reassuring squeeze. “Okay, gotta cut that bit out... how about another question? ‘Crowley! I can’t believe you’re a demon! What cool demon powers do you have?’”

“Do you think they’d believe it if you actually did a few demonic miracles?” Aziraphale wondered.

In answer, Crowley removed his sunglasses, revealing his yellow snake eyes, then snapped his fingers and called a bottle of wine to him (one of a rather good vintage that he’d been storing in his flat for a while), as well as two wine glasses. The cork popped off the bottle by itself, and the wine bottle too moved independently to pour itself out into the waiting glasses. Crowley handed one over to Aziraphale, then took a sip of his own. “Probably not.”

Aziraphale rolled his eyes at Crowley’s dramatics, and took the list of questions. “Oh! One about the actual episode,” he said, smiling as he read it. “Seems quite a few people didn’t understand your nipples comment.”

Crowley slipped his sunglasses back onto his nose. “Yeah. Guess people aren’t as up to date on the signs of witchcraft nowadays.” Then, more to the camera, he continued: “It’s a thing a, uhh... friend, of ours says quite a bit. No matter that he’s met a witch who, at least I assume, has just your average nipple count, he’s _convinced_  that all witches have more nipples than necessary.”

“That Shadwell sure is an... interesting fellow.” Aziraphale glanced down at Crowley’s phone with a frown. “This next question is: ‘how did people decide on the one woman to give a trial?’”

Crowley nodded. “Yeah, added that one in ‘cause I want to know the answer myself, to be honest. Did she have any particularly witchy tendencies?”

“She had a cat, and a black one to boot,” Aziraphale answered. “I saved the cat too, actually, took it out of the house when people came round looking for the familiar.”

“They really were a superstitious bunch, huh?” Crowley took back the phone, and looked at the list of questions. “Okay, one more before we finish, I think: ‘why do you always have an alien theory?’, to which I say: we’ll stop theorising that aliens did it when all you guys stop constantly crying UFO every time something weird happens.”

“Quite. Well, as Crowley says: ciao!” Aziraphale gave the camera a little wave, and it shut itself off. “Come on, Crowley,” the angel said as he stood up to collect the recording equipment, “I saw a nice looking Italian place over by the seafront earlier, we should try it out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Was that ground really consecrated or did Crowley just want to be held? The world may never know  
> Also can you tell that I love Cornwall


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter took so long to write! Halfway through last chapter I had an idea which became a whole other fic, so I’ve been writing that instead of this. On that note, I think I’ll be taking a break from this fic for a while to write that one instead. It has an actual plot, ish, so that’ll be fun.   
> Thanks for all the comments, and enjoy!

It was five in the morning, and rather than being asleep in bed, Crowley was out stalking the streets of London.

For any other demon this would be typical behaviour, but Crowley was rather fond of his beauty sleep. For any other demon, the reason behind the stalking would be trying to find more people to tempt, souls to damn to Hell and such. Crowley’s purposes were slightly different.

The demon stood at the entrance to a building that he’d been in twice and seen the entrance of once. In the building, which looked like most other abandoned three storey terraced houses in the area, was a basement. The very same basement that Crowley had found himself summoned to a few weeks previously.

It had been a while since the event, but Crowley still felt as though Sam and Dean deserved some sort of recompense for their actions. Hence the stalking, at five am so as not to alert Aziraphale and worry the angel.

Crowley turned away from the building, and surveyed the surrounding area. Everywhere else on the street seemed occupied, which was inconvenient. His plan required an abandoned building, preferably one that hadn’t already been used in one of their videos. The two - friends? siblings? Crowley hadn’t been able to tell, they called each other ‘bro’ a lot but that didn’t reveal much - fellow youtubers had a large focus on visiting ‘haunted’ houses, so Crowley, in all his demonic scheming genius, had decided to find a house to haunt.

It had to be one in this general area, since he was pretty sure that they lived round here, and he wanted them to discover his staged haunting sooner rather than later. He’d spent the last week hiding in Aziraphale’s arms as horror movies played on the TV in his flat, so Crowley considered himself pretty knowledgeable now on what constituted a haunted house to the average human.

There were no unoccupied houses on the street, but eventually Crowley found one just a few streets away that looked like it hadn’t been lived in in several years. By this point it was almost nine, and so Crowley simply made a note of the location, then walked back to the Bentley and set off for the bookshop.

— — —

“Hello, dear,” Aziraphale greeted as Crowley walked into the store, bang on nine o’clock. “Where have you been, so early in the morning?”

Crowley blinked. “Where have I been?” he repeated, trying for innocence, “What do you mean by that?”

The angel gestured vaguely to Crowley. “Usually you come over right after waking up. You look a little more alert today, I suppose.”

Inwardly cursing his predictable nature (at least when dealing with his angel), and also his lack of ability to lie to said angel, Crowley sighed. “I was out looking for a haunted house. Well, a non-haunted house to haunt.”

Aziraphale frowned. “Trying to fake a haunting for one of our videos?”

“Not quite. Trying to fake a haunting for _Sam and Dean’s_  videos.”

The frown morphed into a full-on scowl. “I thought we were done with those two?”

“Yeah, well...” Crowley tried to think of a reasonable excuse. Nothing less petty than the truth came to mind. “I want revenge.”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale started, chiding as if he were speaking to a small child rather than a 6000 year old supernatural entity.

“You don’t have to get involved,” Crowley defended, crossing his arms over his chest. “I’ve got it planned out. Just going to make it look haunted, wait till they come around to make their video, and...”

“And?” Aziraphale repeated, expectant.

Crowley huffed, drawing more into himself. “... Haven’t thought of that yet,” he admitted quietly.

Aziraphale was incredulous. “Haven’t thought of it - Crowley! I know you might not agree, but I really think that those two could be quite dangerous if they ever found any holy water, and...”

Crowley sighed as Aziraphale continued his tirade. This was exactly what he’d been trying to avoid: now the angel was getting worried, and worked up, and he’d try to stop him, and -

“... so of course, I’ll have to come with you.”

“You _what?_ ” Crowley said, a grin spreading across his face.

“I’m not going to be able to stop you,” Aziraphale explained, “so I’ll have to come with. That way, at least I can defend you if they’ve brought some holy water or anything.”

“It’s bold of you to assume they’d be that prepared.”

Aziraphale gave Crowley an unimpressed look.

“Okay, okay. Here, I’ll walk you through the plan so far.”

— — —

The rest of the day was spent having a nice day out - dining at the Ritz, feeding the ducks in the park, the usual. Then, after a good night’s sleep in the bedroom above the bookshop, and a hearty full English breakfast at a nearby cafe, Aziraphale and Crowley set out to set up the haunting.

Once they’d arrived at the building Crowley had chosen for his haunting (this took a while, since they’d had to walk; Crowley wasn’t about to let Sam and Dean see the Bentley and potentially give the game away), the two walked in and miracled up some images, nicely printed on A4 paper, of the face of a ghostly looking girl. Aziraphale cut round the face with some conjured scissors, and then they spent a few hours pressing the images to various windows as people walked past.

As night neared, the second stage of the haunting plan came into action. Crowley had a speaker that he’d very much _not_  allowed into the Bentley, and a CD containing some assorted strange, spooky sounds. He set it off at top volume.

“Are we done for the day, then?” Aziraphale asked.

Crowley shook his head. “We need to be here, just in case someone comes round to check. If they find out it’s all a fake, we’re rumbled.”

Crowley could sense Aziraphale’s disappointment at his words - they had yet to eat any kind of evening meal. “Wait here,” he instructed, then walked into the adjacent room, where most of his haunting equipment was being stored. Inside one of the bags was a picnic basket, filled with food in his flat and then summoned with the rest of the items.

Aziraphale gave a small gasp as Crowley carried it back in. “A picnic!”

“Yeah,” the demon placed the basket down on the slightly dusty floor, opening it to reveal a myriad of foods, all perfectly preserved at their individual ideal temperatures. He summoned the picnic blanket, setting it down for Aziraphale to sit on. “We’ve been to the Ritz a few times, so...”

Aziraphale smiled, getting the reference, and the two settled down to eat. Once Crowley had eaten his fill, he summoned a bed (a sleeping bag would perhaps have been more appropriate to the situation, but Crowley was not one to sleep in anything less than luxurious conditions), and lay down for a nap.

For the next few days, Crowley and Aziraphale fell into the same routine. Crowley would awaken, the two would take a brief jaunt out for breakfast, then return to try and grab the attention of people on the street, allowing of course for a quick lunch break. As night fell, They’d turn on their CD, and Aziraphale would keep watch for potential ghost hunters while Crowley slept.

The first break from this structure came after five days of continuous haunting. Crowley and Aziraphale were in the window-ghost portion of their day, when a group of teenagers walking past actually saw their print out. Only one of the teens actually did a double take to look back up at the window, but one was enough. They got the attention of the rest of their friends, pointing wildly at the ghostly image.

Leaving Aziraphale to hold up the picture, Crowley crept off to a different window and pried it open. Immediately, noise from outside started to drift in.

“Holy shit!” One of the other teens was saying, “That’s totally a ghost!”

“Yeah, right,” The third in the group, and the only one who hadn’t pulled out their phone to snap a picture, scoffed. “It’ll be a prank, or something.”

“You’re such a spoilsport, Tiffany,” the first teen said accusingly.

“Yeah, Tiff.” The second teen turned to Tiffany. “If you’re so sure it’s fake, you should go in there yourself and prove it!”

Tiffany glared at the two for a second, then shrugged. “Whatever,” she said, finally pulling her phone from her hoodie pocket. “If I don’t come out in ten minutes feel free to assume I’ve been eaten by the ghost, I guess.”

Having heard enough, Crowley closed the window.

“Someone’s coming up!” he hissed to Aziraphale. “Time for stage two!”

At Crowley’s words, Aziraphale miracled the paper he was holding out of existence, making sure to keep out of sight of the windows. As per the plan, Crowley was now on his way over to the fuze box of the building, ready to flicker the lights, and it was down to Aziraphale to create the jumpscare.

The angel looked at the image they’d been holding to the window for the past few days. The face of the young girl stared back at him. It was probably best, he figured, to stay on brand. So, Aziraphale spent the few minutes before their teenage scare-ee arrived forming an illusion of a body to go with the ghostly face.

From experiencing Crowley’s researching, Aziraphale knew that Victorian styled clothes were quite stereotypical in the movies, so he gave his conjured apparition a nightgown from that time, and just to add a bit of scare factor he put some blood splatters over the nightie. Once satisfied that it was realistic enough, the angel removed the conjuration, and waited, hidden in the doorway to another room, to make it reappear.

Soon enough, the time came. The teenager walked in, looking slightly nervous as the lights flickered around her, but mostly undeterred.

She walked over to the window where Crowley and Aziraphale had been. “Huh,” she said to herself, “no picture...” Still, she shook her head, and, with a little effort, pried open the window, to shout down to her friends: “See? Nothing up here!”

Aziraphale couldn’t quite hear what the response from outside was, but it made Tiffany sigh, and wave her phone to the window. “Yes, I’m still recording!” she shouted, “Even though there’s no stupid ghosts up here!”

That, Aziraphale decided, was his cue. As soon as Tiffany turned back round, camera still in hand and recording, he summoned the faked ghost back into the room, right in front of her.

Immediately, the teen screamed, jumping back towards the window. Luckily, she kept grasp of her phone. Outside, her friends started shouting up.

Tiffany ignored all this, too busy being frozen in fear as she stared at the ‘ghost’. After a few seconds, she regained her bearings enough to start a mad dash out of the room. Once satisfied that she was gone, Aziraphale came out from the other room.

Crowley was already back from the fuze box. “I think that went quite well,” the demon said, looking out of the window.

Aziraphale went over for his own inspection, and found that Tiffany was just now getting out of the building. Both he and Crowley had to jump to opposing sides of the window to remain out of sight as the girl started gesturing wildly up at them. Her friends gave her an odd look, until she showed them her phone, at which point the trio sprinted off down the street.

“Success,” Crowley said, once he could no longer see the teens, “That’ll be on youtube by tonight for sure. And a dozen other sites, probably. Now we’ve just got to wait for Sam and Dean to catch wind of it.”

— — —

The emphasis in Crowley’s words most definitely should have been on the _wait_ , rather than the _just_. It was a rather boring few more days spent in their haunted house, refreshing Sam and Dean’s youtube page, and various social media accounts, with the occasional wrong would-be ghost hunters coming round that they had to fend off.

It was Aziraphale who first saw the long-awaited post. He was refreshing Twitter (if nothing else, this experience had done wonders for the angel’s ability to understand the various new corners of the internet that he’d been nicely ignoring for the last few years), and noticed that there was a new post by the ghost hunting duo.

Aziraphale read the post, realised what it was saying, and then ran off to Crowley’s bedside to wake the demon up.

“Crowley!” he said impatiently, giving the demon a gentle pat to the face.

“Asssssiraphale...” Crowley, still mostly asleep, reached an arm out from under his bedsheets, groped around until he was holding Aziraphale’s arm, and tried to tug the angel into the bed. “... have... hugsssss...”

Aziraphale took hold of Crowley’s hands, and pulled him _up_  into a hug instead. Once the demon was suitably upright, Aziraphale tried again to wake him. “I was just on the Tweeter -“

“ _Twitter_ , angel,” Crowley corrected sleepily.

“- and there’s been a new post. They finally heard about the haunting. Apparently, they’re going to be doing a livestream in half an hour or so.”

_That_  woke Crowley up. “Really?” the demon asked, jolting into a proper sitting position, “Excellent, okay,” he got out of bed, and the bed promptly disappeared, “we just have to stick to the plan... Where’s our camera?”

Aziraphale smiled at Crowley’s enthusiasm, and held up the camera. “We have half an hour, dear,” he said, calmly, as Crowley miracled himself into his usual outfit in such a rush that he managed to get it wrong. “We have plenty of time,” he continued, very impressively not letting the image of Crowley wearing his trousers on his arms and his shirt as a skirt make him laugh.

With a snap of his fingers, Crowley’s outfit rearranged itself into a more suitable configuration. “Right, right,” he said, “You get our stream ready to go live, I’ll warn the rats.”

Crowley had decided, after sending the third lot of ghost hunters running, that the routine needed some variety. So, he’d gone out after his local group of rats, and recruited them in the effort. This now would be their third performance, and in Crowley’s opinion the little troupe (not so little really; there were hundreds of them) were getting pretty good. Their act was a simple one: upon Crowley’s cue, the assembled rats would all come out from darkened corners of the first room people came across, and would make a beeline for the exit.

Apparently, people took animals running from things as some sort of portent of doom. Crowley thought of the tendency horses had to buck him from their backs, then dismissed the notion as superstition.

Nevertheless, people leaving after a rat-infested haunting had, on the whole, seemed more scared than those before the addition, so the rats stayed.

“Places,” Crowley said, clapping his hands as though calling the rats to the wings of a stage, “its the real performance in about thirty minutes. _Not_ a dress rehearsal!”

The rats dutifully scurried off to their positions, and Crowley returned to Aziraphale to check his progress. The angel had managed to get the camera set up so they would be able to stream, mostly by virtue of believing that it couldn’t be _that_  hard, and so it wasn’t. Open on another tab on the laptop was Sam and Dean’s youtube channel, where they had also put up the stream announcement. Crowley checked the post time. “Twenty minutes...”

There weren’t really any other preparations to be made, given that most of what made the building appear haunted was just miracled up into existence as a jump scare, or changing the sounds of the strange radio devices some people used to ‘communicate with spirits’ to say spooky things like “this place is haunted, bugger off” (Crowley), and “ooh, this is a very haunted building... spooky!” (Aziraphale). So, for the next twenty minutes, Crowley resumed his regularly scheduled constant page refreshing.

Eventually, nineteen minutes later, one of the page refreshes revealed a new livestream on the channel. Crowley clicked on it, revealing Sam and Dean stood inside the living room they’d been in at the end of their first summoning video.

“Hey guys!” Sam was clearly holding the camera, his arm outstretched to get both himself and Dean in the image. “Today’s haunting is one that a lot of people have been talking about recently.”

“Yeah, we thought we’d check it out, since it’s pretty local,” Dean added.

“Pretty local? More like next door!”

Dean glared at Sam. “Don’t tell people where we live!” He took the camera, focusing it only on his own face, and started walking. Just about visible on screen, Sam started walking after him. “Anyway, yeah, a lot of people have been talking about this one.”

The two demon hunters continued bickering as they left their flat, and made their way down some staircase. As they exited their building, Crowley immediately recognised the street as the view he’d been staring at for so long now.

“They’re here!” Crowley looked up at the window, where Aziraphale was holding up the usual image. On the livestream, Sam was explaining that many people had seen such an image in the windows, and was now pointing the camera over to it.

“Shit!” came the reaction through the laptop speakers, “Maybe this place really _is_ haunted...”

Once the camera moved back away from the window, and the two humans entered the building, Crowley started up his own livestream. Aziraphale tweeted out an announcement using Crowley’s account, and before long their stream had a good few people watching it.

“Hey, guys,” Crowley greeted, keeping his voice down and one eye on Sam and Dean’s stream. They were currently in the entrance, where the rats were poised and ready to strike. “We were getting a lot of questions, lately, about future collaborations. So, I’ve engineered one, of a sort.”

Crowley flipped the camera round so it showed the laptop screen, where Sam and Dean were just becoming aware of the hundreds of glinting eyes in the darkness.

“You may have heard of the haunted house rumours going round recently,” he continued, conversationally, as Sam and Dean met his amateur actors up close. “Well, truth be told, they’re all fakes. Me and Aziraphale,” he swung the camera round, letting Aziraphale give a small wave before he crept off to the fuze box to start up the lights flickering, “have been staging the whole thing. So, it’s not our usual shtick, but stick around if you want to see two phoney demon hunters get scared shitless by two guys with a cardboard cutout of a ghost!”

The paper Aziraphale had been holding up to the window obediently became a full sized cardboard cutout of their Victorian ghost girl, for Crowley to show to the viewers.

“So, yeah, sorry if we fooled any of you, but we needed to catch these guys,” again the camera shifted to Sam and Dean, who’d recovered from their rodent surprise, and were now continuing in the direction of the stairs, under which Aziraphale was ready to make the lights flicker.

It was short work for the two humans to get to the top of the stairs, at which point they went immediately for the room Crowley was hiding in. In one hand he juggled the camera and laptop, and in the other he grabbed his phone, scrolled through his messages until he found ‘Angel’, surrounded by various heart emojis, and fired off a simple message: ‘Cut power now’.

When Sam and Dean opened the door to the main event of the haunting, Crowley was safely in the adjoining room, camera switched to night mode and pointed surreptitiously towards them through the door, which was ajar. Right on time, the lights went out for good, plunging Sam and Dean into darkness. One of the two yelped; Crowley wasn’t sure which.

“Are there any spirits here?” Sam’s voice sounded out after a few seconds.

Crowley, still recording, sent another text to Aziraphale: ‘Get up here, we can just miracle the lights back on.’

If one were listening hard enough, they might have been able to hear a soft “oh”, and then the sound of a palm hitting a face. Then, Crowley received a response: ‘Okay, L.O.L. xx’, which reminded the demon that he had yet to inform Aziraphale that LOL stood for Laugh Out Loud, not Lots of Love.

“We’re not scared of you!” Sam tried again. “We’re armed! We have...” there was the sound of someone fumbling about with something, “this!”

Silence rang out.

“It’s, uhh... a salt shaker! It’ll purify you!”

Crowley had to try very hard not to laugh. To some, lesser, demons, that may be the case. To Crowley, though, salt was simply quite spicy. Give the demon the spiciest sauce at Nandos (Aziraphale wouldn’t be caught dead in the establishment, but Crowley had needed to go there at least once to start up his cheeky Nandos with the lads idea) any day, but salt? No, he had to have a glass of milk handy for that one. Unless they planned to shake it into his mouth or eyes, then, salt would not be an issue.

Aziraphale arrived in the room with Crowley, having taken an alternative route. Crowley gave him a nod, and Aziraphale conjured up the ghost girl, making sure she let off a little light so that the two demon hunters could see her.

While Sam and Dean were preoccupied with screaming, Crowley crept round behind them and prepared to strike. Just as it looked like the two were ready to run off, Aziraphale miracled the lights back on.

“Hey,” Crowley said smoothly.

Sam and Dean both jumped, and span round to face him. “You!” they accused in unison.

“Me,” Crowley agreed. “And him,” he pointed to Aziraphale, who paused in his walking round to stand by Crowley’s side to give a cheery wave. “Figured we’d give the fans a proper collab,” he waved the camera around cheekily.

Sam recovered from the shock first. “So you mean... all this was you?”

Aziraphale nodded. “You’ve been duped, I’m afraid.”

Now, it was Dean’s turn to recover. “What the _fuck_?” he said loudly, not best pleased. Then, he grabbed the salt shaker from Sam, removed the lid, and tossed its contents all over Crowley and Aziraphale.

Since he had sunglasses on, and his mouth shut, Crowley was unaffected. Aziraphale was similarly fine, mostly because angels had no such problem with salt and never had to suffer the embarrassment of asking the waiter if he could please serve that without quite so much salt, for it was far too spicy otherwise.

“Would you look at that,” Aziraphale said mildly, brushing some of the salt off his jacket, “No effect. Will you believe me now when I say that we aren’t demons?”

Neither human responded.

Aziraphale sighed. “It was worth a try, I suppose. Well,” he perked up, turning to the camera that Crowley was still pointing at Sam and Dean, “that marks the end of our special live stream. Don’t expect we’ll be making anything like this again in the future.”

As he spoke, Aziraphale had been looking pointedly at the demon hunters. They both still looked annoyed, and embarrassed, but they shook their heads anyway.

“Good.” Aziraphale took the camera then, and turned it off. Remembering that they were still live, Sam turned off his own camera.

“Right!” Crowley said perkily, able to speak without fear of getting salt in his mouth now that Aziraphale had, with the cameras no longer on them, miracled it all off. He clapped his hands together, sending all the equipment they’d used back to wherever it had come from. “That’s the end of that then.”

Aziraphale nodded happily. “I rather think this calls for a celebration.”

“I saw a restaurant a few streets away that has a lovely cake selection.”

“Sounds delicious,” Aziraphale said, licking his lips at the thought.

The two supernatural entities left the building, chatting happily together, leaving the two humans behind to try and register what had just happened.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The rats are the same rats that appear in the script book, for everyone who knows about that. And another item on the list of things Crowley invented: cheeky Nandos with the lads.  
> So, yeah, this will be the last chapter for a while; possibly until I’ve finished writing this other fic, but maybe I’ll get inspiration for this one halfway through the other and switch back again.

**Author's Note:**

> Don’t forget to like comment and subscribe!  
> Please actually do leave a comment though love me some Feedback


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